This Saturday and Sunday, as well as next weekend.

via Science & the City.

Tips from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Newsletter for reducing the amount of waste we generate during the holiday season.

• When shopping, bring your own reusable tote bag rather than accepting a separate bag for each purchase.
• Choose products that are minimally packaged.
• Give experiences, not stuff.
• Give of yourself.
• Give a gift that keeps giving.
• Donate old things to charity.
• Recycle cardboard and boxes.
• Don’t use wrapping paper.

And many more. Including, of course:

Compost your kitchen food scraps from holiday dinners and parties. Remember, in yard waste composting, compost fruit and vegetable wastes not meat or grease. [In other words, no animal products.]

Some communities recycle Christmas trees, chipping and mulching them for compost or landscaping materials. Trees must be free of tinsel, decorations, nails, tacks or any other foreign materials. Check with your town office to see if a tree recycling programs exists in your area. You can use branches as mulch under acid-loving bushes and shrubs, such as rhododendrons or evergreens.

New York City has a city-wide Christmas tree recycling program. Trees are usually picked up the first couple of weekends in January.

Booming commercial construction is sparking demand for ornamental trees, leading to a 44 percent increase in the price of a pear tree, which helped push the price for buying all the items in the “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” up 3.1 percent in 2006, according to a recent study.

The satirical study, put out every year by PNC Wealth Management [Warning: Link has irritating music!], said rising labor costs led to an increase in the price of skilled labor, including the nine ladies dancing, 10 lords-a-leaping, 11 pipers piping, and 12 drummers drumming.

– ‘Twelve days of Christmas’ gets pricier, CNN

For Internet-savvy True Loves, PNC Wealth Management calculates the cost of The Twelve Days gifts purchased on the Web. This year, the trends identified in the traditional index are repeated in the Internet version, with overall growth of 3.4 percent, compared to 3.1 in the traditional index. Wages are up, with the Drummers earning almost 100 percent more when purchased on the Internet in 2006 compared with an Internet purchase in 2005. And, as with the traditional Christmas Price Index, bird prices are even or, in some cases, down a bit from 2005 levels. In general, Internet prices are higher than their non-Internet counterparts because of shipping costs.

– The True Cost of the 12 Days of Christmas…

Today was opening day of Prospect Park in Lights, an installation of over a half-million LED lights at four entrances to Prospect Park. The Pergola is one of the four. It’s the southeast entrance of the park, at the intersection of Ocean Avenue and Parkside Avenue.

See the lights at Park Circle.

Or the piggy-roll composter, or the roll-the-piggy composter, or …

You can watch the video.

Guess where you “feed” it your kitchen scraps. And from where you extract the compost.

I really don’t want one. Really.

And no, I don’t know why it’s green.

via Scientific American.

• Built Environment
  , via Gowanus Lounge
• Pruned, via Built Environment
• Strange Maps, via Pruned

[Updated 18:45 EST: Added link to Francis Morrone’s personal Web site.]

The third article about Victorian Flatbush in the past two months has caught my eye. They’re all by Francis Morrone, who writes about NYC architecture for the The New York Sun:

• November 24, The Best Balusters on the Block, about Ditmas Park, to the south and east of us.
• October 20, John Petit’s Visionary Home Designs, about Prospect Park South, the historic district just up the block from my home.
• October 13, Generations of Dynamism in Flatbush

The railroad that serves Ditmas Park is the Brighton Line, also known as the Q train, which follows the right of way of the old Brooklyn, Flatbush & Coney Island Railroad, a surface steam railroad eventually purchased and rebuilt by the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company. The BRT decided to run the Brighton Line in an open cut through Flatbush. This hid the train from view in an area ripe for development as a high-class residential district at the turn of the 20th century.

– The Best Balusters on the Block

When the railroad cut was created, they also went from two track to four. Today the outer tracks serve the local stops on the Q line, while the inner tracks serve the express stops of B train, including Church Avenue and Newkirk Avenue. To icnrease the number of tracks, they needed to take land on both sides. This is why the proeprties backing the tracks on the adjacent streets of Marlborough Road (East 15th Street) and East 16th Street are only 75 feet deep instead of the standard 100 feet: they needed an additional 25 feet from each side for the additional right-of-way.

Links:

• Francis Morrone’s personal Web site

Several years ago, I participated in a focus group field-trip to a mock-up of the new cars design.

I can’t wait.


via Gothamist, via across the park

One of my dreams is to design and grow a border for the Addams family: mandrake, wolfsbane, moonflower, the spikiest and thorniest plants. And everything poisonous I can find.

However, in an urban setting, I have to consider the children, and neighbor’s pets. Seems that some in my neighborhood care to overlook these concerns:

Q. I want to grow the huge, gorgeous red-leafed plants I’ve seen on my neighbors’ stoops in Brooklyn. But I’ve been told they are ricinus, the plant that was used to assassinate the Bulgarian dissident Georgi I. Markov, back in 1978. Please tell me this is not the same ricinus but only a harmless cousin.

A. Ricinus, a k a castor bean, is cousin-free. There is only one species, Ricinus communis. The ricin it contains, primarily in the seed coat, is among the deadliest poisons known. And like many plants in the spurge (Euphorbia) family, it can cause rashes in those who are sensitive to it.

– Poison on the Stoop, New York Times, November 16, 2006

The Times response goes on to note “Yet accidental poisonings are rare.” I haven’t seen seen anyone growing this plant myself, but I would be concerned. It would be easy for the seeds to drop down the steps to the sidewalk. There are dogs I know who eat sticks off the sidewalk. They wouldn’t hesitate to snatch up a shiny seed or ten.

via Brooklyn Record.

On Sunday, Nov. 19th, Earth will pass through a stream of debris from comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. The result: a shower of Leonid meteors.
…
Forecasters differ on when the outburst will occur. Estimates range from 0445 UT to 0630 UT on Nov. 19th (11:45 p.m. on Nov. 18th to 1:30 am EST on Nov. 19th). The timing favors western Europe, Africa, Brazil and eastern parts of North America.

Links:

• Wikipedia