I just came across the website for the International Ginger Kids Foundation the other day. It’s good to see that this important social issue is finally getting the attention that it deserves.

Earlier this evening I went to see Why We Fight, a documentary by Eugene Jarecki which apparently won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

It was excellent, and clearly demonstrated the build-up of the “military-industrial complex” since the end of the Second World War (as forewarned by Dwight D. Eisenhower in his outgoing Presidential address), and culminating in the enormous U.S. arms industry and lobby that is the driving force behind the aggressive American military imperialism of the early 21st Century.

As one commentator notes, when you have a defence industry that’s worth $3/4 trillion dollars annually and that makes profits of 25%, you’re going to see a lot more wars.

Highly recommended — if you live in New York, it’s showing at the Angelika Film Centre until this Thursday.

Yesterday I went snowboarding for the first time this season, to Hunter Mountain in the Catskills, self-proclaimed “snow-making capital of the World.” It’s fortunate that they have good snow-making capabilities, because there’s been hardly any natural snowfall on the east coast of the United States so far this winter.

I had a great day yesterday, primarily because the weather was bizarrely warm and sunny; it was much more like spring skiing in California than winter skiing in New York!

I got to meet one of my all-time favourite authors briefly tonight at Barnes & Noble in Union Square near where I work; Paul Auster read a chapter from his new novel, The Brooklyn Follies, and then signed about a million copies of the book, including mine.

They have some pretty good authors at that store; last summer, I listened to Umberto Eco read from his latest, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. I bought a hardback copy, but couldn’t be bothered to queue to get it signed, and I have to say I wasn’t that impressed after reading it.

I finished reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini today (I’m quite possibly the last person in New York to read this book, judging by how many people I saw reading it on the subway over the summer).

It was a very good book, although also very sad and moving. It also had one of the best endings I’ve read for a long time — not good in the “happily ever after” sense, but just well-written and satisfying. I dislike stories that just stop.

Anyway, here’s the filthy lucre link — click on this, buy it from Amazon, and I’ll make 5 cents or something.

This is cool — Pandora is a new free web service that came out of something called the Music Genome Project.

Apparently, the people behind this project have analyzed hundreds of attributes for over ten thousand tracks, and come up with a unique “genome” for each track. The idea behind the Pandora service is that you type in the name of an artist or track, and then it searches the database and plays other tracks with similar attributes.

In addition, you can register whether you like or dislike the suggested tracks, add a track to your favourites list, or buy the track from an online music store.

I can see why they chose the name Pandora — it could potentially open up a time-consuming and costly world of new music if it worked too well! Thanks to Scyld for pointing me to this.

The last two movies I saw at the cinema were Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana, which have four things in common: Firstly, they both benefit from solid, understated performances by George Clooney, secondly, they are both movies with strong social messages, and thirdly (as I just found out today from this Observer article), they were both made by the same production company, Participant Productions, a project of billionaire eBay founder Jeff Skoll.

In addition to producing the movies, they also run a website, participate.net, that encourages people to get involved in social change campaigns related to the themes in the movies. Which I think is very cool.

The fourth thing that the movies have in common is that they are both very good movies.

I got a brand new nephew today! Kaelen Daniel Gill was born at 3:43am local time in Cyprus. Congratulations to Dave & Jo — hopefully there will be some pictures on their podule.co.uk website in the not too distant future.

Today is Day 3 of the MTA strike that has wiped out public transit in New York City, and I’m working from home again.

Yesterday I was supposed to have a meeting (although of course it was cancelled 10 minutes after I’d set off), so I joined the massed throngs and cycled into work. Cycling in was OK, and even quite exhilarating at times on a crisp cold sunny winter’s morning, but it was also quite dangerous, as I had to weave through crowds of people and thick, aggressive traffic to make any headway. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge was also a pain (despite the spectacular views) because it was super-crowded.

I also had an incident. Just before I arrived at my work, I somehow managed to take out another cyclist at the intersection of 6th Ave & 14th Street! We were pulling up parallel at the junction with him slightly ahead and to my right when he suddenly decided to take a sharp left and cross the street with the pedestrians, right across my path. I jammed on my very loud squeaky brakes, at which point he looked around with a “rabbit in the headlights” expression and fell on the floor — even though I never actually hit him! I apologised profusely, and he admitted that he should have looked behind before cutting across the street like that, but I think he hurt his leg, so that was unfortunate. There were a LOT of people on bikes who didn’t really seem to know what they were doing yesterday.

Anyway, the novelty of this strike is definitely starting to wear very thin.

Here’s some very good news: Giant Step are now making an archive of Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide shows available for streaming download. Not only do they offer multiple shows — there are 11 there now, whereas the Radio 1 GP site only offers last week’s show — but their jukebox player also allows you to pause the stream — again, unlike the Radio 1 player.

Good job Giant Step!