Christmas Tree

This is why I love Jamaica Plain.

Song of the Day: Rill Rill

Said the Grammophone has posted a link to download what they've labeled as the top 100 songs of 2010. This was one of them. Thanks to Cheena Marie Lo for hookin' me up with this blog and pointing out the end of the year list.

And here are the 50 most downloaded from Stereogum.

Song of the Day: Maybe So Maybe No

Mayer Hawthorne: So hot right now. Another gem off Stonesthrow. How do they do it?

2010 Debrief

This isn't going to be a What's IN and OUT chart or a list of notable news stories from 2010. I think those lists were invented to address the slow news period around the holidays. You too may have noticed the New York Times recycling more articles than usual on their website.

However, I do think the end of the year brings pause, a moment to breathe and reflect and thank people in your life for being awesome, so I'd like to share what I've been reflecting on. First, some business: I want to thank everyone who's supported me, listened to me and made me laugh this past year. It wasn't the easiest but I learned a lot (read "shit-ton") and had a lot of memorable experiences.

In 2010, I have had three jobs and four different kinds of health insurance. I was diagnosed with and treated for Lyme disease, and later pronounced cured. I had a couple months in which I felt better than I had in 5 years. According to my mint.com account, I spent more than $4,500 on health care and saw more than 16 health professionals this year. That cost figure doesn't include what my awesome parents contributed to the process. And what do I have to show for all that money, time, tears, x-rays, MRIs, IVs, etc.? Sometimes I have days when I'm clearheaded and not in pain and can stay up at a party past 10 pm! I was up 'til nearly 4 am recently. That might not seem significant or smart, but it's a big deal to a former party-starter like myself.

New found energy, clarity and good spirits have allowed me to do some pretty cool stuff this year. I went to Jazz Fest in New Orleans with press passes, celebrated a one year anniversary with Wyatt, found Afro Flow yoga, helped start Article Club, had a trivia themed birthday party and Halloween with my two rad girlfriends, won trivia with yet another awesome lady in my life, drove an '89 Cadillac for seven months, saw some good friends get married, started running again, maintained two gardens, worked my butt off on a farm, ate more amazing produce than ever before, and landed my first decent salary.

I also read some neat books. Favorites included The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan, Food Politics by Robert Paarlberg, Zeitoun by Dave Eggers and Tinkers by Paul Harding

I went to 10 Macrotones shows and saw both Tune-Yards and Elvis Perkins in Dearland twice.

I learned how to preserve veggies and make bread, which was a huge highlight of this year. Country-Style Christmas Marmalade was my most recent project. I used this recipe only I only used half a lemon, didn't use a grapefruit and added homemade apple sauce from 1 apple. I added only the tiniest bit of peel (like a quarter of what you'd get from 1 orange, peel = bitter) and I let a stick of cinnamon sit in the pot for about 15 minutes while the marm cooked down. I also added some OJ instead of water. Enjoy on warm bread.

There was also this neat discovery: RSA Animates on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g&feature=related

Thanks all for your reading and comments this year. Happy holidays!

The Noun Project

THIS is a cool project. Saw it on Kickstarter.
http://www.thenounproject.com/

AMAZING Social Enterprise Opportunity

The Harvard Social Enterprise Conference is on par with TED as far as mind-blowing, world-changing conferences are concerned. And, it's entirely student-run. This year it will be March 5-6, 2011. Check it out.

The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis

This is a speech and interview with American investigative journalist Bethany McLean. She addresses what happened (and didn't happen) between the Enron scandal in 2001 and the beginning of the financial crisis in 2007. McLean is author of The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron and All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.

The video is a little long but well worth watching.

More on Entrepreneurship

Don't keep looking for jobs, make one.

Help me crowd-source my birthday?

A Brief History of Challenge or Crowd-sourcing Contests

(borrowed from a paper written by my colleague Michael Maltese)

For centuries, wealthy individuals, organizations, and governments have offered prizes to address specific challenges from engineering to mathematics. One of the more famous such contests dates back to the British Longitude Act in 1714, when the British government offered prizes for measuring longitude to varying degrees of accuracy. In 1773, just three years before his death, clockmaker, carpenter, and inventor John Harrison claimed the top prize by inventing what is widely considered to be the first accurate chronometer.

Centuries later, French hotelier Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize to the pilot who made the first nonstop flight between Paris and New York City. This financial incentive compelled a number of the most highly skilled pilots in the world to take on the challenge. Out of obscurity, Charles Lindbergh, a 25-year old air mail pilot, succeeded in winning the prize in May 1927, ushering in the new era of commercial flight. Since then, a number of challenge competitions have been held with great success, especially the Clay Mathematics Millennium Prizes and the X Prizes, the first of which awarded $10 million to the first team to launch a reusable rocket that would spur technological development of low-cast space flight. Companies like InnoCentive now work with companies to crowd-source their more difficult challenges, and in the field of social entrepreneurship, Ashoka now runs a number of contests focused on social and economic challenges.

These competitions imbue the belief that the best solutions can come from anywhere. Moreover, they cost-effectively leverage the collective problem-solving power of a large number of individuals, some who may not even be knowledgeable about the specific area, and focus their attention through a prize incentive. As the Orteig Prize demonstrated, these bottom-up contests leverage far more money and brainpower towards solving a problem than if an organization decided instead to find experts and fund their research.

Since the piece above was written, we discovered OpenIDEO, a project of the human-centered design firm IDEO that invites individuals to solve some of the world's greatest challenges by participating in every stage of the design process. A current challenge on the site asks how we might improve access to clean water and sanitation in low-income urban communities.

Coming from a grassroots organizing background, I find this system for soliciting solutions to be the next best thing since knocking on doors and showing up at native plants meetings to find campaign volunteers. So I thought I might apply this innovation creation station idea to a current challenge in my life: deciding what to do for my birthday.

When I turned 16, my high school friends threw me a surprise Rocky Horror Picture Show themed birthday party. Yes, they did. Perhaps because that was so unique, I didn't try to organize anything particularly exciting until just last year, when Melanie and I organized a trivia party. (notice Wyatt's shirt, a party favor)

You wouldn't think that a bunch of 20-somethings who don't all know each other would sit still in a tiny living room long enough to play 4 rounds of homemade trivia but it went surprisingly well. It was also potluck and the food was delicious.

So the question remains,

how can I throw a party that is at least as much fun as last year's?

That is your challenge dear readers! Please help the cause by commenting on this post and leaving a suggestion or voting on one of the ideas below.

Here is what has been suggested so far:

- Stone Soup party, everyone brings an ingredient for the soup
- Mad Libs
- Apples to Apples (we would make our own cards at the party)
- A special concert, ideally including the Macrotones and the one and only Nariman Moghtaderi
- A video scavenger hunt (it's WAY too cold to do this in January in Boston unfortunately)
- Bring your favorite food that you've never made (maybe too stressful?)
- Pub Crawl
- Beck Hansen Party - each person must personify a line from a Beck song, i.e. "cocaine nosejob", "devil's haircut," or "hot sex in back rows"



Hit me up! The deadline is December 27th. The party will be sometime in late January. Winners receive an invitation to and/or VIP pictures from the event.

Song of the Day: Djohariah

Michigan native and multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens really kills it in this song from his recent EP All Delighted People. Most of the song is just a chorus chanting and Sufjan wailing on electric guitar. Then he throws in some of his signature sad, aggressive, stab-you-in-the-heart lyrics towards the end. I've always enjoyed Sufjan's music because it has a unique quality of pulling you out of the everyday. It's the ultimate soundtrack for mindfulness.

Great Gifts for the Holidays

I don't know about you but that phrase makes my stomach turn.

I do want to give my girl Laura props for sending me a hilarious and wonderful gift of four garden gnomes. I'm looking forward to naming them all.







This past weekend Wyatt threw a Hanukkah party. I made Challah for the first time. It turned out okay. We also had cabbage, brisket and of course, latkes!



The bread.


The guests.

An idea a day

I find myself full of ideas these days. Some might be good, others not so good, but I think it's time to start keeping track of them, in case any of them are worth anything. Feel free to comment and tell me that I'm a genius, a lazy dreamer or a complete lunatic.

1. Healthy Gift Basket Subscription
You can buy people gift basket subscriptions of almost any kind these days: Beer of the Month, Cheese of the Month, Bacon of the Month and even dog treat of the month. Why not cater to the health-obsessed, tree hugging, my-body-is-a-temple folks with a green, good for you, health food gift basket. Sounds questionable, right? But, what if each month was a different yummy and not bad for your surprise, like fair trade organic chocolate, vegan energy bars, assorted detox teas or locally grown root vegetables with a recipe on how to use them? It would be like SELF magazine but edible. Also interesting: herbal remedy club



2. Vest with personal heating unit
Tired of hunching your shoulders against the wind? Ever feel like if you could keep the spot between your shoulder blades a little warmer it would make the winter much more tolerable? I have a preliminary design for a special warming vest. It comes with a reusable heating pad that you can warm in the microwave in two minutes, then pop in a pocket in the back of the vest. Wear it under your coat or when you go to sleep. It will keep your neck and upper back warm for more than 30 minutes. Perfect for walking the dog or setting out on your commute in the wee hours.



3. Alternate Economies to Fight Climate Change
Not to be a cynic, but it doesn't look like we're going to pass a Cap and Trade bill in America any time soon. Still sea levels are rising, weather is changing, we're destroying communities in the name of coal and doing myriad other things to ensure our future is not so promising. There is a lot to be done legislatively to fix our future, but we can't count on the government alone to get us out of this deep fried pickle. We need corporate buy in. We need more companies to invest in a clean energy future, more investors to invest in clean energy companies and all parties involved to create those green jobs everyone's been talking about. We need to create economic alternatives for people in communities that rely on dirty energy.

But why trust companies to be charitable? And creating incentives takes money and the government time. In Appalachia, where people have an intense love/hate relationship with the coal industry, there has been some success in luring businesses in to create employment alternatives but not nearly enough.

Instead of trying to create incentives for companies to go to the people who need them, why not make new companies? We could train community members in the art entrepreneurship, identify needs in the communities and create common sense business solutions to address them that are both environmentally and economically sustainable. It might sound crazy but I think it's a sweet idea.




More soon...

Healthy 2x Baked Potatoes?

Almost! These are potato-innards mixed with milk, salt, pepper, mushrooms, spinach and some homemade bread crumbs, accompanied by chicken marinated in homemade vinaigrette. Mushrooms, onions and garlic were cooked in Two Buck Chuck Chardonnay.



Recipe for Bad Ass Vinaigrette:
- lemon juice
- honey
- mustard
- cider vinegar
- olive oil
- one clove garlic
- pinch of sugar

* This is good as a salad dressing and a marinade. We also threw some parsley in but I'm not sure it really added anything.


This Slate piece on diplomatic cables as literature makes me think I should be a diplomat. Who doesn't want to write denigrating reports on the drinking habits of royal families or detailed psychological analyses of foreign leaders?

A portrait of Ben Bernanke

This is currently on display at the portrait gallery in D.C.

Batman, Turkey

Today I was trying to book travel for a Harvard Professor traveling to Irbil (aka Erbil or Arbil) in Iraqi Kurdistan. It turns out it's a really hard place to get there. I also learned that there is a nearby city in Turkey called Batman. It's not rinky dinky. It has an airport and it's apparently a little self-conscious about its name. In 2008, the mayor of Batman sued Warner Bros. and The Dark Knight Director Christopher Nolan for using the name without permission. Read more about that here.


View Larger Map

SJDK on Conan

Conan O'brien looks tired in this video. Sharon looks good and so does my boy Binky Griptite. He is so cute I want to eat him up. This song "If You Call" is one of my faves from the new album. It's almost haunting.

Song of the Day: "I need a dollar"

Another gem from Stones Throw Records, Aloe Blacc's latest album Good Things rocked my world on the way to work this morning. Enjoy.

http://www.aloeblacc.com/

Trees and Stuffing

I wish I had more to say. I feel like I've been eating so much that my brain is clogged with stuffing and bacon fat. I've already attended one gluttonous "Friendsgiving" and this weekend's "Slapsgiving" doesn't promise to be any less hedonistic. I just hope I can still move at the end of the month.

Here's an interesting Thanksgiving recipe for Turkey Cake.

Recently Wyatt and I explored Forest Hills Cemetery. It was my first time visiting the massive place of resting places, now home to the likes of EE Cummings and Eugene O'Neill. The cemetery is full of neat things to look at, including strange sculptures like this wire tree coat.


Signs that include the words "water feature" or "waterfowl" always make me laugh. I think because those words that are rarely spoken outside the realms of landscape architecture and ornithology.

I'm glad they specify that you can't feed any kind of waterfowl. It would be unfair if you could feed the ducks but not the geese, even if geese are less cool and more annoying.

Please share with Obama haters

WTF has Obama done so far? Check it out:
http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/

This is a lot like WTF should I make for dinner, but instead of recipes it provides help with dispelling Tea Party untruths about the useless nature of our President.

Thanks for this Dan.

Halloween 2K10: Boston & Providence

The men of 6 Westerly St as freaky Warhol Monroes at Emily Stone's
We Can't Belize It goodbye bash.

Macrotones jack o lantern at the MacroShow at the Spot Underground in
Providence, Rhode Island.

Wyatt and I made a dual-sided pumpkin with one side celebrating the election

and the other side celebrating hipsters and the advent of Movember.

Madonna Rocks the Vote

Thanks to Ruthie for turning me on to these.



And then this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSM9eLptGsY&feature=related

I can't imagine either one of these actually motivated people to vote but you never know. I guess being stupid and on drugs was cool in the 90s, right?
It's amazing how different Madonna sounds in these videos. It's a far cry from the faux-British accent she sports today.

Where are you voting?

Use this handy tool and you'll be all set!

Polling Place Locator

We're not, in fact, Number 1

This is an excerpt from Tom Friedman's piece in the New York Times today.


So, on Sept. 23, the same group released a follow-up report: “Rising Above the Gathering Storm Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5.” “The subtitle, ‘Rapidly Approaching Category 5,’ says it all,” noted Vest. “The committee’s conclusion is that ‘in spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated over the past five years.’ ”

But I thought: “We’re number 1!”

“Here is a little dose of reality about where we actually rank today,” says Vest: sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness, but 40th in rate of change over the last decade; 11th among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds who have graduated from high school; 16th in college completion rate; 22nd in broadband Internet access; 24th in life expectancy at birth; 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering; 48th in quality of K-12 math and science education; and 29th in the number of mobile phones per 100 people.

- end quote -

We really need to invest in entrepreneurs, particularly in the education sector. I'm going to business school. Who's with me?

Old

Apparently Wyatt isn't the only person who thinks I'm an old lady.

Harvest Party

First we went apple picking...













Then we cooked up a storm.






DC made epic beer can chicken. If you look closely you can see that he went so far as to tuck sage leaves in the chickens' little armpits.






After thoroughly stuffing ourselves with harvest goodies, we strolled down to the Jamaica Plain Lantern Festival, which was fraught with babies and dogs in different fluffy little costumes. On the banks of the pond, a local afrobeat band played, cider was pressed, and homemade lanterns were sold.

Voter Fraud and Voter Registration Fraud are Different Things

I've always thought voter fraud was a crock of sh*t. I'm glad the New York Times is highlighting the newest flavor of this disgusting, unAmerican waste of time.

http://nyti.ms/9qgqol

broke

I thought I was over the whole lyme thing but I think it's back. I have at least a few moments everyday when I feel like I've been hit by a truck. If anyone has any good, inspiring stories of people who have overcome personal health obstacles lying around, do share them with me. I need inspiration.

Cold frame building canning machine

Today I made pickled green tomatoes with some little guys who didn't look like they were going to turn red anytime soon.


Those are huge cloves of garlic at the bottom.

Here is my super jerry rigged cold frame, a.k.a. a poor man's greenhouse.


I made the walls of the existing cinder block raised bed taller by adding a second row of blocks. Then I painted the blocks black to attract heat and covered the whole thing with plastic sheeting. I used old sunflower stalks as tent poles. It's super ugly but it was cheap. I hope the neighbors don't mind too much. We'll see if anything grows. I just planted fennel and carrot seeds and there are already cabbages, swiss chard and collards growing. Fingers crossed!

Tiny, tiny vegetables

Ben Walsh gets married!

My dear friend, Green Corps classmate and former house mate Ben Walsh got married in Vermont last weekend. Here are some of the highlights.

The Round Church in Richmond, VT.


Part of the crew.
Jess, Ben and the priest who looked like an LA model.

Vermont cheese platter, complete with local grapes.


Breakfast in Warren, VT.

One year anniversary in photos

Wyatt and I had an awesome one-year anniversary. We went to the Boston Local Food Fesitival and Haymarket (a wild market of SUPER cheap produce that happens every Friday and Saturday in downtown Boston), before cooking ourselves a 3 course meal.


At the local food festival, I got to meet the man who started Grillo's pickles and he told me some of the secrets behind his delicious products. I highly recommend the pickled green tomatoes, though they won't be around again until next summer.


Wyatt and I made maple-glazed pork, pumpkin soup and bacon meatloaf meatballs with a roasted bell pepper sauce.

Cory Branan in Boston!

Here is my Performer review of Cory Branan. In other press pieces, he has been compared to Ryan, Adams and John Prine. I didn't do that but hopefully my piece still does him justice.

http://performermag.com/Blog/OCTOBER#coryb

Learning: It's what's for dinner

This week I learned that the internet is far from carbon neutral. The energy necessary to maintain ever growing servers might as well be the mountain top removal of the future, another problem that could go largely unnoticed and unchecked for decades. Ugh.

I'm still on this big entrepreneurship kick and I wonder if someone can create a creative business to alleviate the issue. I've started to think of social entrepreneurship as the answer to all social problems, especially in this time of high-unemployment. For example, what if, instead of fighting with coal companies in West Virginia about the value of environment vs. jobs, we just gave local communities the tools they need to create their own companies and economies? Surely there must be some alternative to the coal economy.

Seeing people speak at Harvard has been neat, although I do it so often now I didn't go to the Obama rally today because I didn't feel like seeing another person talk at me. But - back to the positive - I am learning a lot of new things.


At a recent talk called "Understanding the Yemeni State," I learned that part of the reason the U.S. and Yemen butt heads is that Yemen is unwilling to give up its unusual security arrangement. The official army is only about 60,000 troops and the government relies heavily on tribal reserve units for big conflicts and to keep tabs on the country's hard-to-patrol areas. Additionally, poetry is a huge part of the political process in Yemen and there is a long tradition of using words rather than coercive force to influence actors. Throughout Yemen's history, leaders who were not especially eloquent would hire poets to help push new policies forward.

Thursday, I went to a seminar about the floods in Pakistan, said to be one of the most devastating natural disasters of this decade. Even though not that many people died, the flood wiped out much of the livestock in the poorest region of the country, where people typically don't have titles to their land and assets are held in livestock. It's been estimated that it will take $30 billion to replace what's been destroyed. Only a few billion has been pledged by the international community so far so basically, the situation is really bad.

Rescue efforts in Pakistan have been hindered by poor record keeping and a lack of access to real time data. A lot of villages affected by flooding just simply aren't on the map and neither are the nearest hospitals. Luckily, there is a small group of civilian computer engineers working on the problem. More about that here.

Much of the discussion at the seminar addressed challenges to emergency preparedness and response. Harvard Kennedy School's Dutch Leonard discussed issues with the current trend in actions by the international community: underinvestment in prevention, overinvestment in recovery and the tendency of Western countries to abandon people mid-recovery. I was shocked to hear him say that, while the earthquake in Haiti happened almost a year ago, not a single US dollar has made it to Haiti yet. What!?! Apparently, if we help countries decentralize both emergency preparedness and response efforts, we can expect better results in the future. Bangladesh has done a good job in this category as a poor country that has managed to address natural disaster preparedness, in their case for cyclones. So, that was all kind of neat to learn.

Wednesday, we had our second ever Article Club meeting, co-hosted by Wyatt and Kaz. The article was about friendship and we ended up talking a lot about how Facebook impacts friendship and how strong friendships, or lack there of, influence the divorce rate in America. I enjoyed our discussion, but I'm hoping the next article has nothing to do with the internet. I still like to think it does not completely rule my life. We had around 15 people in attendance, lots of chili and lots of chocolate chip cookies. Drew, an Article Club member and recent Portland, OR transplant, has a great little blog of daily poems that incorporate the top Google hits of the day.

GOOD magazine has an interesting blog post about the word "like", and how it is not an "Americanism inflicted on us by the Valley Girls of the eighties" but rather an older habit used by English-speakers all over the world. Les Janka, an avid anti-"like" advocate, will be disappointed to hear that.

It's starting to get chilly again in Boston and already I am fearing the worst. I'm remembering what it's like to feel the draft blow through my living room as I, wrapped in all the clothes I own, hold my nose to keep it warm while trying to read a book. I thanked God every time I walked outside this week and discovered that, although my house was freezing, I did not in fact need to be wearing long underwear. Cory Branan recently tweeted that he was starting a petition to move New York to the South. Can I do the same thing with Boston? I think Boston in North Carolina would be ideal.

If anyone has any tips for baiting mouse traps, please hook a sista up. More than a year into our epic battle against the rodents, they've gotten too smart for us and stopped going in the traps. I recently resorted to buying poison but they appear to be too smart for that too. Little bastards.

The Good and Bad in the World

There are definitely many perks to sucking at the teat of academia. Between the hours spent at the computer, listening to the cellulite congeal on my thighs, I get to meet interesting people and hear some of the World's leaders and leading experts talk about how they're trying to make this planet a little bit better.

Yesterday, in preparation for an event with a high-ranking Turkish official, I had the privilege of leading a combined American/Turkish security delegation through part of the campus. It was nothing short of hilarious. Imagine two big American State Department guys, a Boston-born ex-cop and a Virginian ex-military, as well as two tall Turkish security officials, one young, smiley, tall and lanky with longish hair, the other with a square face, was mostly silent and smoked a cigarette at the first opportunity. In the same two minute-span on our walk back from the school, the American guys made fun of me for being an environmentalist and the one English-speaking Turkish guy complimented me on my shoes. It's nice to know that someone in the world thinks my beat up Target flats are "fresh."

Friday, I sat in on two events with Jordanian businessman, all-around superstar and founder of ARAMEX Fadi Ghandour. ARAMEX is essentially the FedEx of the Middle East. People like to think that you can't easily do good business in the region, let alone start and new company, but Fadi has proven this assumption wrong several times over. He was also instrumental in founding one of the first successful Arab social networking websites, which spawned a flurry of web-based start ups in the Middle East after it was bought by Yahoo in one of the largest acquisitions of a knowledge-based company outside of the U.S. AND, he's into social entrepreneurship. More specifically, he sees entrepreneurship as a way to solve social problems that governments are failing to address, much like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood have done. Hamas initially won votes in Gaza because it provided essential services that no other entity would. If businesses can tackle the needs of their communities in the absence of government support, gangs and terrorist organizations won't have to. Now that's good stuff.

Earlier last week, we hosted two events to highlight both sides of the current peace talks between Israel and Palestine. Both speakers said nothing is going to happen- surprise, surprise. However, good points were made at both events and I will report on them when I have my notes in front of me.

As one might imagine, given that the events were in Cambridge, Mass, there were only protesters at the Israeli speaker's talk. This guy scared the crap out of me when he pulled a Palestinan flag out of his pants. I thought it was a gun at first. Despite my personal feelings on the conflict, I found his disruption of the event really off-putting and unprofessional, especially since he held the flag backwards for much of the event.

There are more strategic ways to make a point.

This weekend, Wyatt and I went to Berklee's Beantown Jazz Fest on Columbus Avenue. Highlights included lots of free stuff, tasty ethnic food, and two great bands from New Orleans: Jon Batiste Band and the Wild Magnolias. The latter came with Mardi Gras Indians in tow.

Tonight, Noam Chomsky was on "On Point" on WBUR addressing my recent fears that the Tea Party will take advantage of less-than-straight-thinking Americans in this fragile economic time and smother our country just as Hitler did in Germany. Chomsky doesn't think things will happen just like that but he did say the comparison was worth considering. Eek. The show was also good fodder for my campaign to get "On Point" a better interviewer than Tom Ashbrook. I swear that guy is the most socially awkward host on the radio. He kept trying to talk over poor 81-year old Noam and he just comes across as a big tool. Sorry Tom. I love your show but show a little more tact