Getting Greener, Environmentally And Financially

To be honest I can't recall if Euro's come in green.  But the little central Italian village of Tocco da Casauria is making a pretty penny with it's new green power installations, and it's also drawing international attention.  It was great to see this article as the above the fold front page lead in the NYT yesterday...

Apparently the NYT has it set up so that I can't embed the photo here, instead of pulling it down and putting it back up, I'll just say that it was a neat little article.  The residents of the town have embraced the renewable power and since the excess power is being purchased for the grid the local taxes for trash removal and some other city services are being paid for.  All in all, it is a small but remarkable and promising success story.

No you didn't miss the link, if the NYT doesn't want to share the artwork for the story then I won't link to it.

A History Lesson

Of sorts I suppose...



Kottke was right, this was the best thing I saw today.

A Bigger Boat

Well, NOAA has one now.  Actually they've had the R/V Henry B Bigelow for a while now but she's just making her way to Woods Hole, the ship's putative home port. 

The Cape Cod Times has a nice little rundown about the new ship and her capabilities, automated fish species sorting anyone?  Flat screens that prompt researchers to sample specific fish based on research requests and associated printers that run off id bar codes for the samples? The Bigelow is the boat for you.

I also enjoyed the mention that since the Bigelow is bigger than her predecessor and therefore trawls more slowly 630 side by side trawls were performed in order to construct a conversion matrix so that the newer records would remain compatible with the older data.

You can see the official NOAA specs here.

The Cape Cod Times ran a nice graphic as well...

You're An American, Act Like It

Fresh from the wilds of the internets comes this great Uncle Sam poster...

HTWW had this little nugget up the other day, but they couldn't find it's original source or creator.  Be sure to let them (or us) know if you have the info.

Read This Now - Getting Raw

Tony Bourdain has a new book out, or maybe it's been out for a while but I just heard about it.  I thoroughly enjoyed Kitchen Confidential and after this rambling, eviscerating, and ultimately redeeming review from another of my favorite food writers (Michael Ruhlman), Medium Raw is on my reading list.

Ruhlman closes it out thusly, be sure to check out how he gets there:

But the facts are these. In the same way that great food writing is about more than just the food, so too is Medium Raw commentary on matters well beyond the incestuous world of restaurants and cooks. This book of memoir, travel writing, food writing and reportage is entertaining, informative, thought provoking, and genuinely artful in its structure and satisfactions.  He would surely lose what little respect he has for me were I to say this to his face, but Bourdain proves himself here to be the most insightful commentator on food and restaurants and chefs writing today.  By far.  By a mile.  I seriously hope this is the last book he writes.  He’s a freak of nature, and somehow it’s just best that way, that he remain untouchable.

One Hundred And Fifty Nine Seconds

Of delightful hand dancing to help brighten your mood...



Yes, the internets really are quite something.

(via CMW)

Way Outside The Box

We're going to need ideas like this to pull off a livable and fun word in the future...



Yep, asphalt is another one of those things that depends on fossil fuels, they are literally everywhere.

(via Ebert)

Say Cheese, Or Hmmm Now I Kind Of Want An IPhone

This is pretty neat, looking at least...

All the details are at Gadget Lab, which is always full of good stuff.

Get Along Little Kitties

So Ikea let a bunch of folks bring their cats to a store in England and gave the cats the run of the store (more or less) for the evening.  Seems mostly for fun, but the end of the video is an Ikea ad, and it's a pretty good one...




And yes, of course there is a parody...




(via EESK)

Bigger And Badder

You may have noticed some new posts on the blog that seem to have miraculously appeared from the very ether of the internets.  If you're a keen observer, you'll recognize the posts as not new but relocated ones.

When Coppola Comments first started I was on a very political bent and wanted to keep the lighter side of life separated from my screeds.  These days it makes a lot more sense to just have all of the ramblings right here together.  So page Too is now part of the main blog and won't be getting any new updates, it will remain as an archive of sorts, although of course now all of those posts are here as well.

We'll also be cleaning up and expanding the labels that we use, since they had been limited to Read This Now posts and now they have expanded to include the labels used on page Too.

So have fun, explore the older posts if they're new to you, and please keep coming back for the new ones of all shapes and sizes.

Our National Parks

I'm finally in a class on land use and policy, which is a topic that fascinates me.  So much so that I'm sharing some of the 'reading' for the last class.

Those quotes are because I think you should find 45 minutes to watch the Ken Burns film This Is America.

It isn't embeddable so you'll have to follow the link.  The film is beautiful, informative, and entertaining.  In short, it's worth your time.

Read This Now - Reading List

These three pieces all come from the very good Best of the Moment from The Browser...

Did you know that Darwin was one of the pioneers of environmental management and terra forming?  Seems he started the project that turned Ascension from a barren volcanic cone about as far from anything else as you can get.  To a fairly lush and green volcanic cone in the middle of the ocean.

Actually there are atheists in fox holes. One of them happens to cover a Navy Chaplain's back...

"He trusts God to keep him safe," says RP2 Chute. "And I'm here just in case that doesn't work out."

See also the quote from the Chaplain Corps historian.

And William Gibson discusses Google and our relationship with it and cyberspace.

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we’d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we’d bridle, then begin our next search. 

That should keep you out of trouble for a while.

The Best 4:50 You'll Spend Today - Courtsey Of Ben Folds, Nick Hornby, & Pomplamoose

Keep watching through the end, you'll laugh and hear about a cool album collaboration on its way out.  Also that's a staggering amount of books, not sure if it makes me feel better or worse about my to read pile...

(via Snarkmarket)

We're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat

Not really, but I love that line and I just couldn't resist.

Seems that fishermen going after cow-nose rays in the Potomac River netted themselves an 8 foot bull shark this week.

Pic courtesy of Buzz's Marina via WP

Over at Bay Daily, Tom Pelton was quick to point out that the shark's presence is actually an encouraging sign, given the decline in shark populations world wide.  From a local standpoint it's good as well since shark's are one of the few predators of cow-nose rays which are a horribly destructive, and more or less invasive, species that wreak havoc on Bay oyster beds and aquatic vegetation.

NPR had an interesting story last month on the increase in white shark sightings in New England in the late summer that you might like to check out as well.