Video Games Conquer Retirees

Seth Schiesel
The New York Times
Friday, March 30th, 2007
pg A21
The Story
The Summary: Senior citizens are joining the video game craze.

When I first saw the title of this article, I got worried. I know people who don't have jobs, don't go to school, but they play video games all day. But they grew up in the '90s... in the midst of the video game era. I don't like the idea of my grandma wasting away her final years in front of the TV playing "God of War." (Although, I don't think I have to worry about my grandma playing video games, she doesn't quite understand how solitare on the computer works)

After reading the article, I love the idea. From retired Roman-Catholic sisters playing mini-games like Bejeweled to seniors playing Wii Bowling instead of regular bowling, games aren't taking over seniors lives, they're enriching it.

Most games (like those for the X-box and the PS3) are created for the young male, with complicated graphics and storylines. The games that seinors are picking up on are the simple games created by companies like PopCap games, or those created for the Nintendo Wii. These games are often refered to as "casual games," mostly because of their simplicity and ease.

A senior who started a Wii bowling league says he prefers Wii bowling to regular bowling because he doesn't have all the aches and pains from the weight of the ball. Yet there's still an element of low-impact exercise to it. My roommate, who owns half a Wii (the other half is owned by her fiance) said she woke up with sore arms after playing Wii boxing one evening.

The Wii has taken the industry by storm. Going back to the principles of early games, when the systems were simple, so the games had to be fun, Wii games are simplistic, but fun. They're also the most interactive home video games. Unlike most systems, there's activity for all of your body, not just your fingers and thumbs.

I'm a big fan of social games. If you can hang out with people, yell, scream, and have general conversation while playing, it's fun. I'm not a big fan solo games that take over your life.

To social, casual games!!!

Up in the Attic, New Millennium Style

Fred E. Bernstien
The New York Times
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
pgs D1&D5
The Story
The Summary: The attic, tradtionally used for storage, is getting a make-over into interesting living space.

I've always love spaces like attics or basements. Little corners of houses where you could hide, they were different and interesting from the norm.

There was a room in my grandma's basement that was an "office." It was actually a very small bedroom that my brothers and I would play office in, it even had an old typewriter. I think that's part of the fun of attics and basements. All of the old things stored there. Things with family history, fun things from the past, just things that aren't part of a normal routine.

The spaces these families created with their attics are incredible, especially the one in Texas. (Check out the article... pictures are attached!)

I love interesting spaces. I think that's part of why I like the house I live in. At one point it was a traditional "Bemidji Skinny" (a thin house located in Bemidji, they were supposedly very popular back in the day) Someone purchased it and, due to its close location to campus, realized they could make money if the split the house into two apartments - up and downstairs. So they created a bathroom and kitchen out of nothing upstairs. We also have a random sink in the back room surrounded by cabinents, we still haven't figured out what they're for, and we've been living here for 1.5 years. After awhile, the owners of our house realized there was wasted land in the backyard, and added on a third apartment, they added on a poorly constructed third apartment. At somepoint, someone decided that it could once again be two apartments instead of three. So we live in a house that has five sinks, 4+ bedrooms, and strange additions everywhere.

I wish you could get pictures of a house through the years before you move into it. Like, this is what it looked like when it was first built, this is what changed in the '72 remodeling, here's what we changed in the 90s... Information like that is sometimes crucial, but also interesting.

I wish I had the money to buy a house and create a space like the ones from this article. They're fantastic!

Overcoming a Frat Party Reputation

Eric Asimov
The New York Times
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
pgs D1&D6
The Story
The Summary: Beer is growing up, from a frat boy guzzle to sophisticated sip, two Boston brothers are taking a lead in the revolution.

Curious, I traveled to the Boston area last week to meet the Alströms, whose Web site beeradvocate.com has become a lightning rod for the pent-up passions of beer lovers everywhere.

They started it 10 years ago, posting notes on beers they enjoyed or despised. Now it is a full-featured site with news, essays on beer history and styles, forums and voluminous notes on brews from around the world. The Alströms say they have more than 100,000 members. Reversing the usual direction of print to Web, they’ve begun publishing Beer Advocate magazine, a glossy monthly about beer and beer culture.

I've often described myself as a beer girl. "Spirits" have never been my thing, wine is alright, mixed drinks are normally to girly to too "college." There's something about a good beer. It can be -26F outside, but a cold beer is wonderful with a hot meal. I love beer with almost anything cooked on the grill. It's great with steak or chicken or fish or... well, you get the idea.

In fact, both are far more mild-mannered and thoughtful than they might appear online. In person, Respect Beer is neither a demand nor a request but a reasonable approach to a beverage that, given a chance, offers the same sort of pleasure and conviviality as a good glass of wine. But it needs the chance.

“I go to a really high-end restaurant, and they come out with a really nice wine list and a book of cocktails, but the beer list is just something the waitress recites and they’re all awful,” Todd said. Jason adds, “That really disturbs me. But some have caught on and they really get it.”

Beer has been the alcoholic beverage of lower class males, that's just that. With beers like Natty Light for less than $10/case, it almost deserves it. Beer has this cheap aura about it. But not all beers are cheap. In fact, I've come to live by "Life's too short to drink cheap beer." I bought a twelve pack of Miller Lite before Christmas break, I gave 6 to my uncle at Christmas, there are still four in my fridge. I try to give them away when people come over, it doesn't work. I might make beer cheese soup one of these days.

“One of our main goals is trying to raise the image of beer as a whole and bring back the beer culture,” Todd said. “We had a beer culture but Prohibition kind of reset the button.”

The popular image of beer drinkers has always been the industry’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The slobbering yahoos at the football game with the bare chests and painted faces; the snarling mud wrestlers battling over “tastes great, less filling,” and the usual array of good ol’ frat house antics are all representations from the mass-market beer industry itself, which has succeeded by aiming low. The cost has been respect, and the result has been a decades-long battle to win it back.

Beer was the first alcohol to come back after prohibition ended, during the Great Depression. Everyone was poor back then. From then on it was the alcohol of the commoner. With that came the slob and the college oafs.

While fraternity behavior is largely associated with beer drinking, serious beer lovers have spent years on the outside of polite society.

Without the pastoral mystique that has been appropriated by wine producers or the suave, sophisticated imagery of the wine drinker, beer lovers have largely retreated to the antistyle precincts associated with such proverbial social outcasts as computer nerds and science fiction fanatics. Bizarre facial hair, unflattering T-shirts and strange headgear are standard equipment among beer geeks.

I know plenty of people who can have a beer or two after work, or with supper. It's here that the normal people and the beer geeks collide. The middle-class man who comes home to a can of Bud Light might be introduced to Sam Adams, and from there become more exploritory with their selections at the liquor store, exchanging quantity for quality.

Everyone can be a bit of a beer freak. It doesn't mean you have to be a complete snob, just be more open. Don't worry about ratings on websites so much, drink what you like. If you like Miller Lite, drink it. I've found that most beer snobs like dark beer. I don't like bitter, dark beer. I'm sorry. My favorite is Leinenkugel's Honey Weiss Bier. It gets horrible ratings, but it's popular here.

Eat, drink, and be merry.

I'm gonna go get a beer.

LIFE Magazine, Its Pages Dwindling, Will Cease Publication

Katherine Q Seelye
The New York Times
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
pg C2
The Story
The Summary: LIFE magazine is closing, again, this time for good.

Time Inc. announced yesterday that LIFE magazine would cease publication next month, the third time since LIFE’s founding in 1936 that its owner has pulled the plug.

This time, the magazine’s demise looks permanent, largely because LIFE is moving its huge archive of photographs onto the Web, where consumers will be able to download them free.

I wish I would have been around when LIFE was in its heyday. I would have loved to be an editor at LIFE. People don't appreciate great photographs anymore. (or so it seems) The world has become about getting the story, not getting the story well. First it was the clock, now it's the camera... everything has a camera in it. It's not so much about taking a good photograph as it is about having proof. Some sort of evidence that this happened.

Time Inc., part of Time Warner, has been in turmoil with layoffs and an overhaul of its flagship Time magazine as the company shifts its attention to the Internet. It blamed the newspaper business for the demise of Life, which has been carried as a newspaper insert since October 2004.

“While consumers responded enthusiastically to Life, with the decline in the newspaper business and the outlook for advertising growth in the newspaper supplement category, the response was not strong enough to warrant further investment in Life as a weekly newspaper supplement,” the company said in a statement.

This really is the end of an era. Much of American history can be viewed in the photographic archives of LIFE. While the magazine hasn't actually existed for seven years, this final closing of LIFE is like someone dying in the nursing home. You knew it was coming, but you had kind of hoped that it would pull through and be better.

The newspaper supplement racket is hard to be sucessful in, since it isn't soley consumer driven. People can request that their newspaper carry a certain supplement on Sunday, but often newspapers are owned by a larger company that determines that. Our own Bemidji Pioneer is owned by the Fargo Forum. One can only imagine that the parent company makes such decisions.

Although rumors of LIFE’s impending death have persisted over the last two years, Bill Shapiro, LIFE’s managing editor, said that he “started hearing the drumbeat in the last week or so.” Mr. Shapiro had reinvented the magazine to be what he called “an antidote” to grim news headlines, but its reincarnation as a newspaper supplement had come at the wrong time.

“The pall cast over the newspaper industry didn’t make it a sexy sector in which to advertise,” he said.

The magazine began as a weekly and was first closed in 1972. LIFE was revived as a monthly in 1978 and shut down in 2000. In its heyday, it occupied five floors of the Time & Life Building in Midtown Manhattan; today its staff takes up a corner of one floor.

Goodbye LIFE!!! We'll miss you!!!

The Album, a Commodity in Disfavor

Jeff Leeds
The New York Times
Monday, March 26th, 2007
pgs C1&C8
The Story
The Summary: As people buy songs as digital singles rather than in albums the industry is signing artists in the same way.

Last year, digital singles outsold plastic CD’s for the first time. So far this year, sales of digital songs have risen 54 percent, to roughly 189 million units, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. Digital album sales are rising at a slightly faster pace, but buyers of digital music are purchasing singles over albums by a margin of 19 to 1.

Because of this shift in listener preferences — a trend reflected everywhere from blogs posting select MP3s to reviews of singles in Rolling Stone — record labels are coming to grips with the loss of the album as their main product and chief moneymaker.

The music industry is now embracing the digital single. When Napster was at the height of its popularity the digital single was the music industry's biggest threat. The popularity of mp3 player and the advent of legal digital downloads has made CD almost obsolete.

At the same time, the industry is straining to shore up the album as long as possible, in part by prodding listeners who buy one song to purchase the rest of a collection. Apple, in consultation with several labels, has been planning to offer iTunes users credit for songs they have already purchased if they then choose to buy the associated album in a certain period of time, according to people involved in the negotiations. (Under Apple’s current practice, customers who buy a song and then the related album effectively pay for the song twice).

But some analysts say they doubt that such promotions can reverse the trend.

“I think the album is going to die,” said Aram Sinnreich, managing partner at Radar Research, a media consulting firm based in Los Angeles. “Consumers are listening to play lists,” or mixes of single songs from an assortment of different artists. “Consumers who have had iPods since they were in the single digits are going to increasingly gravitate toward artists who embrace that.”

I love my iPod, and I only have a little one. It's so much easier than a CD player for long trips. I'm not taking my eyes off the road to change a CD (yes I've done it, and yes, I know it's stupid), I'm just blindly grabbing for my iPod while paying perfect attention to my driving. And you can run with them, take them for bike rides, I never liked working ou until I got my iPod. I even have a special playlist for working out. It's full of high-energy songs that help me work harder.

“For some genres and some artists, having an album-centric plan will be a thing of the past,” said Jeff Kempler, chief operating officer of EMI’s Capitol Music Group. While the traditional album provides value to fans, he said, “perpetuating a business model that fixates on a particular packaged product configuration is inimical to what the Internet enables, and it’s inimical to what many consumers have clearly voted for.”

There's really no point in putting the money and energy into a produing a full-length CD when no one will buy it. Maybe K-Fed should have thought of this. Maybe if he would have released a few novelty singles, he would have been a bigger success.

A decade ago, the music industry had all but stopped selling music in individual units. But now, four years after Apple introduced its iTunes service — selling singles for 99 cents apiece and full albums typically for $9.99 — individual songs account for roughly two-thirds of all music sales volume in the United States. And that does not count purchases of music in other, bite-size forms like ring tones, which have sold more than 54 million units so far this year, according to Nielsen data.

One of the biggest reasons for the shift, analysts say, is that consumers — empowered to cherry-pick — are forgoing album purchases after years of paying for complete CD’s with too few songs they like. There are still cases where full albums succeed — the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ double-CD “Stadium Arcadium,” with a weighty 28 tracks, has sold almost two million copies. But the overall pie is shrinking.

The last CD I bought was Jessica Simpson's "A Public Affair" I'm a big "single" person myself. I like to hear the songs I want, with out all the BS. Half the time I skip over half the songs on my iPod.

I also don't normally have the patients to sit through a whole CD by one artist. I like variety, variety is the spice of life. A little bit from column A, a little from B, along with C, D and E as well.

Like the article says, it's a trend. We've gone from the single to the album, and now we're back to the single. In a fifty years, who knows what we'll be listening to. No one could have predicted the iPod in the 80s, the record was just dying out, giving the cassette tape its 15 minutes of fame before the CD took it away. In fact, no other format has had the same run as the record. If digital music lasts as long as records did before falling out of favor, its worth it for the music industry to invest in singles.

Affluent White Families Lead Way in Manhattan Baby Boom

Sam Roberts
The New York Times
Friday, March 23rd, 2007
pg A19
The Story
The Summary: What was once thought to be a place only suitable for people with out children, Manhattan is becoming quite the family place, mostly because of rich white people.

Manhattan, which once epitomized the glamorous and largely childless locale for “Sex and the City,” has begun to look more like the set for a decidedly upscale and even more vanilla version of 1960s suburbia in “The Wonder Years.”

Since 2000, according to census figures released last year, the number of children under age 5 living in Manhattan mushroomed by more than 32 percent. And though their ranks have been growing for several years, a new analysis for The New York Times makes clear for the first time who has been driving that growth: wealthy white families.

We have to face it, it's become fashionable to have children again. Everyone in Hollywood is doing it. A baby was once a killer for a career, now, it's just another person to love and accessorize. A combination of all the modern conveniences and the societal embrace of the working mother has made it more than acceptable for rich people to keep their lifestyles and have children.

Fashion has embraced children as well. A mother can buy a $750 diaper bag that's just as stylish as her purse (and matches quite well). Her son can wear the same pants as her husband (in his sizem, of course).

What those findings imply, demographers say, is not only that the socioeconomic gap between Manhattan and the other boroughs is widening, but also that the population of Manhattan, in some ways, is beginning to look more like the suburbs — or what they used to look like — than like the rest of the city.

This scares me. I grew up in the country, fantasizing about Manhattan. When I finally get there, I don't want it to be over run by toddlers in trendy overalls. I want the city from Sex and the City, I don't want day-care and playdates to out run bars and hot hook-ups.

Compared with those in the rest of the city, the youngest children in Manhattan are more likely to be raised by married couples who are well off, more highly educated, in their 30s and native born.

“This differs from the rest of New York City and the suburbs, where small kids are present among a more diverse array of economic and demographic groups — single-parent families, renters, those in their early 20s with low to middle income,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

Educated, career-driven people wait to have children. There's nothing surprising about that. There are people who are content to get married and have children and make that their life. Then there are people who want a good life, and wait to bring children into that life. I don't quite understand the people who choose the first option.

But Fred Siegel, a history professor at Cooper Union, said a growing population of upper-middle-class residents was an asset. “How different it makes Manhattan from other cities,” Mr. Siegel said.

Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University historian, said: “Imagine the reverse — that nobody with money wants to live here, and then you have Detroit. I don’t see how anybody benefits in that circumstance.”

Professor Siegel said that until now, at least the cost of private school and the demand for space prompted many parents to move when their children got older.

Sub-urban life was supposed to be better, wasn't it?

Urban children grew up to be in gangs or druggies or something, didn't they?

Aparently, urban children in the largest city in the country go to private schools and drink $5 coffees with their parents on their way to school.

Mr. Osborne, 44, an expert on the Russian economy for a firm of financial advisors said: “If both parents are working, it actually becomes logistically difficult to live in the suburbs. If you’re 90 minutes away, we just don’t like that feeling.

“Even if we were disposed to — for the usual space, quality of life reasons — to go to suburbs, we would have to consider the practical difficulty.”

This is a wonderful example of how people are giving up less to have children, and said children are benefiting. Their parents have a 20 minute walk to work in the morning, rather than an hour and a half train ride. They get to experience the city. I love "the city" any city... growing up on a farm in the middle of no where, nothing was in walking distance, we had to drive everywhere. There was nothing to see except for fields and other houses for miles.

I'm not saying one is better or worse, but I have a feeling I missed out on something with that lifestyle, that I'm never going to have what I could have if I lived somewhere bigger.

While the number of children of all races between ages 5 to 9 in Manhattan has declined slightly since 2000, the number of white children of that age grew by nearly 40 percent.

David Bernard, 42, and Joanna Bers, 38, run a management and marketing consulting business and live with their 17-month-old twin sons on Fifth Avenue. Both grew up in suburbia.

“I like the idea of raising them in the city because they’re prepared for pretty much anything,” Mr. Bernard said. “The city challenges you; it prepares you for life.”

This whole article reminds me of an particular episode of Sex and the City that, among other things, sums up a lot of my feelings about love, marriage, and children. It's titled "A Woman's Right to Shoes." Carrie attends a baby shower, and is forced to remove her $485 brand-new Manolo Blahniks because her friends don't want stuff tracked into their apartment. When she returns to her shoes, she finds them missing. Her friend sends her home with a pair of ratty tennis shoes, saying she's sure Carrie's shoes will turn up. When Carrie returns the forementioned tennis shoes and confronts her friend about the shoes, the friend offers to pay for them, but refuses to give Carrie the full amount, saying that she "has a real life" and shouldn't have to pay for Carrie's "extravegant lifestyle."

Apparently, being single and have fabulous shoes (among other things) isn't a real life. This story means that there are less Carries, and more mommies. I'd rather be a Carrie.

The Year Without Toilet Paper

Penelope Green
The New York Times
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007
pgsD1&D7
The Story
The Summary: A family in Manhattan is trying to make "No Impact" by only buying food, fresh produce and the like, and making no waste.

Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.

Mr. Beavan, who has written one book about the origins of forensic detective work and another about D-Day, said he was ready for a new subject, hoping to tread more lightly on the planet and maybe be an inspiration to others in the process.

Also, he needed a new book project and the No Impact year was the only one of four possibilities his agent thought would sell. This being 2007, Mr. Beavan is showcasing No Impact in a blog (noimpactman.com) laced with links and testimonials from New Environmentalist authorities like treehugger.com. His agent did indeed secure him a book deal, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and he and his family are being tailed by Laura Gabbert, a documentary filmmaker and Ms. Conlin’s best friend.

I couldn't imagine it! No garbage, no waste (or as little as possible) I know I couldn't do it. I try not to create too much garbage, and we recycle fairly well at my house, but nothing as drastic as this. I couldn't imagine a compost heap inside an apartment. Compost is an outside thing... it's for gardens. I don't think I'd like the smell of rotting food in my house constantly. It's bad enough when the trash needs to be taken out.

Before No Impact — this is a phrase that comes up a lot — Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan were living a near parody of urban professional life. Ms. Conlin, who bought this apartment in 1999 when she was still single, used the stove so infrequently (as in, never, she said) that Con Edison called to find out if it was broken. (Mr. Beavan, now the family cook, questioned whether she had yet to turn it on. Ms. Conlin ignored him.)

In this household, food was something you dialed for.

“We would wake up and call ‘the man,’ ” Ms. Conlin said, “and he would bring us two newspapers and coffee in Styrofoam cups. Sometimes we’d call two men, and get bagels from Bagel Bob’s. For lunch I’d find myself at Wendy’s, with a Dunkin’ Donuts chaser. Isabella would point to guys on bikes and cry: ‘The man! The man!’ ”

As drastic as the experiement is, I think everyone could take a few pointers from this family. They basically went from one extreme to the other. There's a happy medium that I think is attainable for everyone. Doing things like switching regular light bulbs for flourescent ones, and cooking more and eating out less, and using carbon-based travel as little as possible(I try to get groceries and run other errands after work, so I'm not making two trips across town) are things that every household can do.

The television, a flat-screen, high-definition 46-incher, is long gone. Saturday night charades are in. Mr. Beavan likes to talk about social glue — community building — as a natural byproduct of No Impact. The (fluorescent) lights are still on, and so is the stove. Mr. Beavan, who has a Ph.D. in applied physics, has not yet figured out a carbon-fuel-free power alternative that will run up here on the ninth floor, though he does subscribe to Con Ed’s Green Power program, for which he pays a premium, and which adds a measure of wind and hydro power to the old coal and nuclear grid.

The dishwasher is off, along with the microwave, the coffee machine and the food processor. Planes, trains, automobiles and that elevator are out, but the family is still doing laundry in the washing machines in the basement of the building. (Consider the ramifications of no-elevator living in a vertical city: one day recently, when Frankie the dog had digestive problems, Mr. Beavan, who takes Isabella to day care — six flights of stairs in a building six blocks away — and writes at the Writers Room on Astor Place — 12 flights of stairs, also six blocks away — estimated that by nightfall he had climbed 115 flights of stairs.) And they have not had the heart to take away the vacuum from their cleaning lady, who comes weekly (this week they took away her paper towels).

Think about how much healthier these people will be after this year. No junk food, their legs will be ripped from taking all the stairs, their arms all buff from carrying baskets of clothes up and down said stairs. A cleaner lifestyle is definately a healthier one. Of course, reader's of the author's blog have criticized the Colins-Beavan's for that:

“What’s with the public display of nonimpactness?” a reader named Bruce wrote on March 7. “Getting people to read a blog on their 50-watt L.C.D. monitors and buy a bound volume of postconsumer paper and show the filmed doc in a heated/air-conditioned movie theater, etc., sounds like nonimpact man is leading to a lot of impact. And how are you going to measure your nonimpact, except in rather self-centered ways like weight loss and better sex? (Wait, maybe I should stop there.)”

I think that awareness is the first step. And, yes, it takes some waste to get the word out there. Overall, I think that these things can only do good. Things have been getting better. Most paper products contain a percentage of recycled paper, many are becoming high content to 100% recycled. More and more people are using flourescent bulbs, one of my roommates and I got our other two roommates to start recycling more. (If I could only get them to shut off the lights when the leave.) People are becoming more aware. It's the day to day stuff that makes the most impact , anyway. It's not everyday most people see a movie or buy a book.