The best time to turn a pay phone into a lending library is early on a Sunday morning, said John H. Locke, an Upper West Side architectural designer who may be the world’s leading expert on the subject.   Last winter, Mr. Locke designed a lightweight set of bookshelves to fit inside the common Titan brand of New York City pay phone kiosks.  A fabricator in Brooklyn cuts the shelves, which Mr. Locke paints and assembles in his apartment.  So far he has carried out four installations, most recently at Amsterdam Avenue and West 87th Street just before 8 a.m. on a Sunday last month.  As several sleepy-eyed patrons of a 24-hour deli looked on in confusion, Mr. Locke snapped a lime green bookcase into place, stocking it with children’s books and paperback novels.  Hooks on the unit allow Mr. Locke to install it without hardware, and the entire process took less than five minutes.   He had barely rounded the corner before a man who had been standing outside the deli began browsing through titles, choosing “The Shining” by Stephen King, tucking it under his arm and heading home.  What happens to the installations after the first few minutes is a bit of a mystery to Mr. Locke.  He checks on them periodically, he said, until they disappear — after a few days or a few weeks.  Which is fine with him.  “It’s a spontaneous thing that just erupts at certain locations,” he said. “People like it, people are inspired by it, but then it disappears again.”  The libraries have endured long enough to attract their share of fans.  Publishing houses, bookstores and neighbors have approached Mr. Locke to donate books for future installations.  The project is currently being featured in Spontaneous Interventions, the United States’ contribution to the International Venice Architecture Biennale, an architecture show.  If any disused fixture of city streets cried out for repurposing, it would seem to be the pay phone.  The city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications acknowledges as much.  In July, the department began soliciting ideas about what to do with the city’s remaining 13,000 sidewalk pay phones once the current contracts expire in 2014.  Not that they are completely obsolete. The city cites federal data showing that the number of pay phones nationwide declined to 872,000 in 2007, from 2.1 million in 1999.  But the average pay phone here was used to place six calls a day in 2011, not including emergency calls, according to the city.  And in a single week in December, 8,264 calls were made to 911 from sidewalk pay phones.  Perhaps more important to the city, pay phones brought in $18 million in revenue in the last fiscal year.  Of that, only about $1 million came from callers’ quarters; the rest came from advertisements displayed on the side of the phones’ cabinets.  Since the agency would be loath to give up that money, it is considering the suggestions that it turn phone booths into touch-screen neighborhood maps; convert them into charging stations for mobile devices or electric cars; or use them as dispensers for hand sanitizer.   The city is also engaged in a pilot project to use pay phones as Wi-Fi hot spots.  Eleven pay phones, including ones in every borough but the Bronx, have been providing free Wi-Fi since July.  About 2,000 people logged on to the networks in August, according to the city. Users stayed connected for an average of 38 minutes.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/nyregion/ny-designer-puts-lending-libraries-into-pay-phone-kiosks.html?_r=2&ref=books

September 11, 2012  PATTERSON, Calif. — At the moment, it is little more than dirt and gravel.  But a sunbaked field at the edge of this farming town will play a significant role in one of the most ambitious retailing ventures of the era:  the relentless quest by the online mall Amazon.com to become all things to all shoppers.  A million-square-foot warehouse stocking razor blades and books, diapers and dog food will soon rise on this spot, less than a mile from the highway that will deliver these and just about every other product imaginable to customers 85 miles away in San Francisco.  It is hundreds of miles closer to those consumers than Amazon’s existing centers in Nevada and Arizona.  A similar distribution center is being built on the outskirts of Los Angeles.  Others are under way in Indiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.  This multibillion-dollar building frenzy comes as Amazon is about to lose perhaps its biggest competitive edge — that the vast majority of its customers do not pay sales tax.  After negotiations with lawmakers, the company is beginning to collect taxes in California, Texas, Pennsylvania and other states.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/technology/amazon-forced-to-collect-sales-tax-aims-to-keep-its-competitive-edge.html?ref=technology

Kale is an excellent source of vitamins A, C, and K; it also contains impressive amounts of calcium, fiber, and antioxidants.   Kale's bold, rich flavor, chewy texture, and peppery kick taste great with robust ingredients (think dried crushed red pepper, soy sauce, strong-flavored cheeses, Sherry wine vinegar, fish sauce, bacon, or pancetta).  Find recipes at:  http://www.bonappetit.com/ideas/kale-recipes/search  Yes, you can eat kale raw.  You will find many recipes on the Web. 

Somehow, the author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation's third president, Thomas Jefferson  found spare time to meticulously document his many trials and errors, growing over 300 varieties of more than 90 different plants.  These included exotics like sesame, chickpeas, sea kale and salsify.  They're more commonly available now, but were rare for the region at the time.  So were tomatoes and eggplant.  In the nearby South Orchard, he grew 130 varieties of fruit trees like peach, apple, fig and cherry.  All the time, he carefully documented planting procedures, spacings of rows, when blossoms appeared, and when the food should come to the table.  These days, some of the Jefferson garden bounty is sold to the cafe at Monticello, some goes home with employees, and many plants in the garden are allowed to go to seed.  Jefferson's once-pioneering garden now acts as a seed bank to perpetuate rare lines and varieties like Prickly-seeded Spinach and Dutch Brown lettuce, all for sale at the gift shop.  Despite the diversity of vegetables Jefferson's garden produced, the recipes unearthed by scholars and attributed to his family were quite typical for the day:  Boil everything. Some of the recipes survived and were reprinted in The Congressional Cook Book (1933).  If you're looking for instructions for Colonial American-style Cabbage Pudding and Dried Beans, check http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924086713504;seq=49.  Graham Smith  http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/05/10/152337154/thomas-jefferson-s-garden-a-thing-of-beauty-and-science

In the U.S., butter flavor used for microwave popcorn has been found associated with increased risk of bronchiolitis obliterans in workers makning flavored popcorn.  That was a story in 2008 that prompted the U.S. House to pass a bill to limit workers' exposure to diacetyl, a key ingredient found in artificial butter flavors commonly used in microwave popcorn.  Diacetyl can cause popcorn lung or bronchiolitis obliterans if people have been exposed to too much of it for too long.  Popcorn workers are at high risk of exposure to this chemical and more likely than the general population to develop the deadly disease.

http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Nutrition/Food/butter_flavor_bronchiolitis_obliterans_0920120653.html

 

A U.S. federal court jury on September 19 awarded a Colorado man $7.2 million in damages for developing a chronic condition known as popcorn lung from a chemical used in flavouring microwave popcorn.  Jurors agreed with the claims by Wayne Watson, 59, that the popcorn manufacturer and the supermarket chain that sold it were negligent by failing to warn on labels that the butter flavouring, diacetyl, was dangerous.  The condition is a form of obstructive lung disease that makes it difficult for air to flow out of the lungs and is irreversible, according to WebMD.  http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1259742--man-wins-7-2m-lawsuit-after-developing-popcorn-lung-from-inhaling-artificial-butter-smell-of-microwave-popcorn

 

"Dickens of Detroit" is awarded The National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters  Elmore Leonard says he’s thrilled to receive one of the literary world’s highest honors.  The 86-year-old crime novelist will be presented with the medal in New York on Nov. 14, the same evening this year’s National Book Awards are announced.
In taking home the National Book Foundation’s lifetime achievement award, Leonard joins a list of past recipient that includes Ray Bradbury, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, John Updike, Gore Vidal and Tom Wolfe.  http://elmoreleonard.com/