Ricky Gervais @ Tribeca Performing Arts #2


Ricky Gervais @ Tribeca Performing Arts #2

Just got back from seeing Ricky Gervais’ first warm up gig at Tribeca Performing Arts, prior to his big shows at Madison Square this weekend. Splendid stuff indeed.

This is the first time I’ve seen Gervais live and he was fabulous. Easy banter and subtle expressions translate into high comedy under his expert guidance. My only gripe was that the show was very short, clocking in under 50 minutes. Plus if you’re easily offended this is not a show for you – British humour can be pretty blunt sometimes, well past the point of political correctness and Gervais is adept at making you squirm while you laugh out loud. There’s also something in his manner that reminded me of Eddie Izzard, who is playing at the Just for Laughs festival this year by the way, but this is definately Gervais’ own unique style of humour. Classic.

Oh, and if a venue says ‘No flash photography’ and for some reason you can’t turn your flash off, then hows about you don’t take photographs almost constantly for the last 15 minutes of a show? Now there’s a thought for the idiot who sat in seat G111. Cheers mate.

More pics.

Concientious Meat Eating

When I first came to New York, myself and my then girlfriend would always share one main course between the two of us. Normally this would involve some annoyance on the part of the server, and often either a surcharge or a requirement that we both had a starter, but what it never involved was either of us being hungry. New York portions, like most portions in America, are huge. Only when you eat at really up market restaurants do the portion sizes flip flop, and you end up paying more money for much less food – quality not quantity.

Unfortunately after years of living in New York I’ve gotten used to eating a whole single portion myself, as my gut will attest and last night was no exception. On the way home from a talk I decided to stop by a local restaurant for a lovely coq au vin. This came in a bowl over-flowing with chicken, with very little space for the sauce. By the time I’d finished I was pretty darn full, from a dish that was mostly meat and maybe two small onions. Food coma set in rapidly.

This question arose in my mind while eating – why don’t I become vegetarian? I know that we can survive without eating animals, plus kittens are cute and fluffy as are calves. The only problem with this idea is… I like meat. Yep. That’s a biggie. So I’ve now hit on the concept of ‘concientious carnivorousness’. My premise is this; in choosing to continue to eat meat we all have a responsibility to the animals that gave up their lives to make best use of their sacrifice. This can be carried out by simply eating every piece of meat on your plate and trying not to put too much meat in your meal to help make sure you eat all of it. To that end restaurants could help by setting up an objective measuring system for how much meat is in a portion, and offering reduced size portions. Simple really. Coff.

Carbon Footprint.. 19k again!

Just found another carbon footprint site – this one calculated my personal emissions as 18.6 tonnes of carbon, so not far off the other day’s 19! This site was better for flights, in that you can actually put in where you flew, but doesn’t take into account the concept of public transport or just the overall emissions of being in New York and the infrastructure that exists. Either way my carbon footprint is a bit fat…

Carbon Feet

Recently the concept of the ‘carbon footprint’ has been getting a whole pile of press in the UK, and even a little bit over here. The concept is simple, your carbon footprint is the equivalent weight of carbon you use living your life and using fuel sources that impact the environment. So I had a go at calculating my Carbon Footprint for last year – this came in at around 19,000kg!

My figure of 19,000kg bizarrely is the average figure for people in the US. The UK average is 11,500kg. Compare these to 11,000kg average for all industrial nations, and a world wide average of only 4,000kg. The US isn’t doing so well in there, and neither am I. So how can I do better?

Well for me, as a public transport using New Yorker, my biggest impact is flights. I’ve been flying a lot back and forth to Montreal this last year and also quite a few times back to the UK. These account for 11,000kg of my total! Otherwise I’d be well below the US and UK averages. So as a Brit living away from his family, what am I to do? Well the simple answer, other than stop flying so much, is carbon off-setting, which is where you pay to have trees planted that use up the carbon and produce oxygen. Given that an average tree consumes 730kg of carbon in its life, and the goal is to have only 4,000kg of emissions a year, that means I should be planting 21 trees this year alone to offset my costs. Phew! I can spend some money and feel better about things, that’s good. Does it actually work? Who knows, but more trees can’t be a bad thing.

The other interesting question for me is – how can I make my trips between New York & Montreal more carbon efficient? I mean there’s no way I can get back to the UK without flying, so that’s a given, but I can either fly or drive up to Montreal. Strangely enough, even though a flight to Montreal only takes an hour, with customs and check in it almost takes the same time door to door to drive as to fly. The downside of this is I don’t have a car here, so I have to hire one. Now I just need to find an accurate calculator that can tell me the difference between a 700 mile round trip in an economy hire car, and a 55 minute flight in a small jet plane.

amazing sushi @ Gen, Brooklyn

Just a quick thank you to the talented sushi chefs at Gen. This wonderful sushi place is located a short walk from the Brooklyn Museum of Arts, in an area that seems a little run down. Although it is out of the way for most people, I highly recommend a trip out there – the fish is sublime, and the portion sizes for the sashimi are almost double that of most places I’ve been. They even make their own soy sauce.

Sunny Weekend

It’s been a lovely sunny weekend here in New York, so mostly I’ve been out and about having sandwiches in the park and enjoying the weather. That and getting my bike out properly for the first time this year and realising that maybe I’m a bit rusty…

As usual, now that the first warm days are here, the thought of putting my air conditioner back in my window arises. This activity constantly scares the sh*t out of me, through worry that the large chunk of metal I’m man-handling into my window will suddenly decide to take gravity’s advice and jump. To date this has never happened and I pray that it never will. I wonder if everyone here shares this fear, or if it’s just the side effect of not having grown up in a country which is obsessed by living in fridge cold air?

10 Years Over

Tony Blair has just announced his resignation as Prime Minister of Great Britain. It was just over ten years ago as we watched him get voted him and a new era in our history started. However you feel about Blair now, I feel that he’s done well for our country over all that time and he reflects that in his leaving speech. One can only wish that Clinton or Gore had been in power on this side of the world instead of Bush, then I’m sure the whole world would be a more positive place now.

Hopefully the next Labour leader will do as well, whoever it is. Personally I hope that I still feel about them as I have with Blair, that it would be possible to sit down with them over a pint of beer and discuss the world openly without avoidance and hyperbole – something no American has believed for almost eight years.

Lost: Canon S70 Camera

On the random chance that someone found a black Canon S70 camera in Williamsburg this Monday night or Tuesday morning – it’s mine! It’s in a Yashica pouch and doesn’t have a wrist strap, there’s a 1Gb compact flash card inside which (should) have my name and email address on. It would have been lost somewhere between Union Pool, Royal Oak and the Bedford L stop.

Thanks.

The Best Web Hosting

Bit of a plug – I’ve been using DreamHost for my web hosting for a while now and I have to say they’re awesome! Cheap, responsive and with a good uptime – a perfect fit for my non-critical domains. The best part of hosting with them is you can host unlimited domains under the same account, so for just over a hundred bucks a year and I can host this domain and all my many others at no extra cost. Amazingly this cost is only slightly more than I was paying to host my old MattHobbs.co.uk domain back in the U of K. Crazy.

So go check them out and sign up with the hosting discount code BEST1 to get a discount on the price of the Yearly Level 1 service. Plus then I get a kick back as well and can buy you beers (or orange juices in Matt’s case).