Everybody who writes “Bible” as one of their favorite books is lying

Believe it or not, I just got woken up by the intense thunder outside. It’s raining pretty hard right now and I’m wondering if my flight later on tonight is going to be delayed (or canceled). The rain is supposed to continue on through the day and into the night. Is this a repeat of two weekends ago? I hope not.

Ruby by Kaiser Chiefs is great! I think this video for the song is neat too.

I never ever want to eat just 300 calories in one meal. Never.

Good news! Some NYC Parks are getting face lifts from a $1.2 billion plan for all city parks. The plan intends to revive The High Bridge as well as turn McCarren Park Pool back into a pool.

The High Bridge, the city’s oldest standing bridge, will get a $65 million face-lift over about two years beginning in 2008, said the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe.

Other elements of the $1.2 billion parks plan include planting one million new trees; working to ensure that every New Yorker will live within a 10-minute walk of a park by 2030; building lighting fixtures at 36 athletic fields to allow for nighttime play; and refurbishing portions of several large parks that have fallen into disrepair.

To meet its goal of having each person live within a half-mile walk to a park, the mayor’s initiative calls for opening public school playgrounds after school hours, during summers and on weekends; creating at least one new public plaza in each of the city’s 59 community board districts; and expanding the Greenstreets program, which turns street medians into miniparks. The city said it would build 400 new Greenstreets spaces by 2017, bringing the total to about 3,000.

The plan also calls for planting 250,000 new street trees, in addition to the city’s current 600,000 trees, during the next decade, with a goal of a total of one million new saplings on public and private property by 2030.

I wonder if I’ll still be living in NYC in the year 2030. That seems like such a long way off. How do people plan so far ahead into the future?

This Russian postal trick is just brilliant (and apparently, it works pretty well). Basically, for someone in the USA who wants to send a package to Russia, they can save a lot of postage by actually sending it to Canada and then having the Canadian postal service forward it [for free] to Russia on their behalf. Here’s how to do it. First you write the full Russian address on the label like you would if you were to actually send a package directly to Russia. The only difference is that in the “country” field you put CANADA instead of RUSSIA. Since most postal services are operated by machine, the machine will assume a Canadian address and put it out for delivery with the postal worker. When the postal worker, who obviously has a bit more common sense than a machine, sees that the address is clearly not a Canadian address, he will give it back to the postal service which in turn will forward it to the correct address in Russia. Thus, saving lots of money (but probably taking a bit longer than usual). Kinda neat!
They advise that you don’t use this method for ALL shipments, especially expensive ones, since there really is no guarantee at all that your things will arrive to Russia. But for the most part, it works.

Haha, this Facebook parody is super! Just note that it’s not officially from Facebook at all.