RENAISSANCE.

Everyone! I've moved to a new apartment, embarked on a life of "freelancing," and started a new blog in a new place. Visit me at Down By The River, where I'm having another go at blogging. Discussed so far: Peep dioramas, friends who write books, getting an accountant, political wives, and other miscellany. This is a view from my new apartment. Enjoy.

American Gladiators is coming back!

Just when I retired my blog, cool stuff like this happens! They're bringing back American Gladiators to network television. YES. Says TV Week:

The reinvention of “American Gladiators” is finally under way at NBC. The network is partnering with MGM Television and Reveille for a long-rumored modern update on the campy early-1990s classic.

“This memorable series was once a worldwide phenomenon, and given its built-in appeal, we feel it’s time to reintroduce it to a new generation and take it to a heightened level of excitement for fans of all ages,” said Craig Plestis, executive VP, alternative programming, development and specials, NBC Entertainment. “The ‘Gladiator’ brand is unlike anything on television today, and is event programming at its biggest and best.”

The new “Gladiators” will still have everyday weekend warriors competing against the show’s cast of athletes, but it will add “special effects, water skills and the latest technology,” according to the press release. Also, the show will chronicle the backstory of the competitors as they train for their match.

mahjong.

From the Economist's Hong Kong briefing:

Mahjong menace

Mahjong, a game of skill and chance popular with Hong Kongers, may have unintended side-effects. A report in the Hong Kong Medical Journal has linked the pastime to epileptic fits. The study of 23 patients who experienced seizures mid-game found their epilepsy to be associated exclusively with the playing of mahjong. The authors suggest that the game’s mental demands, coupled with stress of betting and the exhaustion of marathon gaming sessions, can combine to trigger seizures. The best prevention, they say, is to avoid playing or watching the game.

Gotta go tell my moms.

Real World: Earth edition

MTV's "The Real World" is going green.

Maybe Puck will come back and talk about how he's always ridden a bike and that makes him *not* an a-hole. Now that's TV.

Stingray sting

Vietnamese fishermen poaching stingrays off the coast of Malaysia tipped off fellow fishermen to their scheme when they mistakenly flew the Malaysian flag upside-down. nice one.

Read more on the Blue Egg blog today.

top referral.

It's just like Top Chef or something.

Our product development manager told me on Wednesday that he discovered my blog because it was the top referral to the Blue Egg site on Monday afternoon! I was so proud. Of you guys, that is.

Here's a post I did today on Blue Egg's blog about chicken poop saving the environment. Well, sorta.

Read more from me on Blue Egg's blog.

(Illustration by Maira Kalman for Blue Egg. yeah! Maira Kalman!)

hatching something new.

Click the logo or here to check it out. yowzah.

portfolYEEo is dead. Long live portfolYEEo.

Friends, as the countdown begins to the launch of Blue Egg — the startup website that I've been working on for the last half year – I have been thinking hard about whether or not to keep this blog going. And, after struggling with it for some time, I've not decided to entirely delete the thing, but I am going to "suspend" portfolYEEo indefinitely.

I began the blog as a way to have "Internet presence," since all of my writing had previously appeared in print. And while a blog isn't exactly a website, I did start last year by posting PDFs of travel writing and entertainment magazine clips. It's possible that no one read these; over the course of the year I didn't receive any approaches for book deals or commissions for articles. Wishful thinking!

It evolved into a way of forcing me to write everyday, without any idea of how big the audience might be [or could become]. I actually enjoyed that. I decided early on that it was not a place where I'd write about my daily routine of teeth-brushing, or about my personal life at all. To boot, when I was working for Martha Stewart, I certainly couldn't write about work. Whenever the writing would slow, I'd get emails from friends asking me where I'd gone. From friends & acquaintances, people who had never even told me they read the blog, and for whom there was no reason I would suspect they would, except out of pure curiosity.

Unfortunately, as I start writing frequently for Blue Egg, I would like to limit access to information about me, so that the writing there speaks for itself. And time. I've got none of that these days.

Anyway, I will be posting almost 4 days a week on the website (either in blog or news item or long-form feature format), so look for me there. Hopefully you'll be able to enjoy the same tone/voice of mine that you experience here. My first pieces are respectively about fair trade flowers, and about a man in a Florida who collected 11,000 pounds of trash — including a life-size blowup doll – out of a nature preserve in the first ten weeks of a kayak cleanup project.

July 29th. Look out world.

Thank you for spending a few minutes here when you could. I really appreciate it. I guess I hope to see you a click away.

And I will probably talk to all of you soon, some way or another.

I would rather be bacon than a pasty office worker.

dramatic chipmunk.

Because it's been that kind of day.

(Props to John and Annie, who always find the best stuff on the Internet.)