Flu season is nearly upon us, and the good folks at the New York City Health and Mental Hygiene are providing the population with free access to the influenza vaccine. However, while there are over 8.3 million people in New York City proper, there is only a grand total of five free walk-in clinics operated by the city – one for each borough, or one clinic per 1.7 million people. In practice, this turns out to mean that it takes roughly four hours for a person to get a flu shot.
I arrived at 9 am at the clinic on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. The place had been open for an hour, and the line was already a hundred and fifty people long.
I spent the next three hours in line. Arguments broke out over line etiquette. A rat ran through the crowd. Every 20 minutes we shuffled forward en masse as another group was taken indoors. At last I was called, and with renewed vigor I strolled inside and down to the basement … where we were told to sit in chairs. Another half an hour passed.
A custodian cleaning the nearby bathrooms peered at us. “You know, y’all could just head to a Duane Reade or a Walgreen’s or somewhere and get this same shot right now! Fifteen dollars!”
“Twenty-five,” replied a Russian lady.
“Okay, okay, 25,” said the custodian, smiling. “Still, that’s not so much.”
Flu shot! Get your free flu shot!
Finally a female police officer coralled us into the elevator to the fifth floor, and then on to another seating area where we filled out several forms and waited for our number to be called. As I sat down, I heard the nurse bark “93!” I was number 140.
An hour later, I heard my number. After a series of quick questions with an attendant (all of which I’d already answered on the forms I’d filled out), the attendant pointed, without looking, towards a door, and I entered a hallway leading to the exam rooms. And sat down to wait again.
The shot itself, when it finally came, took about a minute and a half to administer. My arm throbbed afterwards.
At this rate, if everyone chooses to save their $25 and go with the public option, for all of New York to be inoculated would take approximately 3,718.6 years. Considering that the flu virus changes annually, we’re a bit behind.
There are about 100,000 hair follicles on the average human head, tended by an 80,000-strong army of hair salons and barbershops in the US. African Americans, though just 12 percent of the population, account for 80 percent of this multi-billion dollar industry, according to Chris Rock’s recent documentary “Good Hair.” So I headed to 125th Street – Harlem – to see how hair salons were doing in the economic downturn.
At Oumou Express, a rental space for freelance hairdressers, most of the booths were empty. A slim man in a sharp jean jacket and suede shoes laughed and swept his hand across the space when I asked how business was going. “I work every day,” Henry Mars said, “but Friday and Saturday are the only days I do work.”
And the work needs to last. That was the message heard by Freddie Decaldeell at Barber Lounge on Premise, who said her business was “low but constant.” She recently hired three articifial hair operators to handle the demand for wigs, weaves and braids, which customers opt for to cut costs. “Braids cut down on the salon business (for real hair),” Decaldeell said.
As customer Kim was getting her black and gold braids done at Super Barber Hair Braiding & Barbershop, she told me, “Usually I’d wear my braids for maximum two months, but I leave them in at least a month longer if it’s going to cost me $100 every time.”
Despite the empty chairs at the salons, Henry Mars remains hopeful. “The days of spending are over,” he said. “Even if times are tough we don’t have to look like it. Things are going to get better. They can’t stay down forever.”
In 2003, I took a trip to the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan to visit my friend Tom, then serving in the Peace Corp.
On my first day in Bishkek, Tom insisted showing me, of all things, a statue of Vladimir Lenin. Only months before, the statue had proudly stood in Bishkek’s Ala-Too central square. But that summer, 12 years after Kyrgyzstan’s former ruler the Soviet Union fell, the statue was removed, replaced by an angel-woman representing Freedom.
With glee, Tom pointed to Lenin’s new home – a block away from the old one. With his iconic visionary gaze, Lenin stood toweringly straight, gesturing his hand to… the American University of Central Asia.
Democrats of the world unite!
This was my first introduction to the paradoxes of modern-day Central Asia. And as I would soon learn, it was just the tip of the iceberg.
These countries – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – have been caught in the crossfires of warring powers for centuries, but the ‘Stans fared particularly badly in Soviet Times. One of the struggles involved the giant irrigation system Moscow laid down in the 1960s. The idea was to divert water from Central Asia’s rivers and lakes and make the region a fertile producer of cotton and other goods.
Sadly, the system was poorly planned and inefficient, and after the Soviet Union collapsed, it fell into gross disrepair. Water sources continue to dry up to this day, and the lack of an adequate sewage system is polluting a lot of the remaining supply.
The most dramatic sign of the irrigation problems is the decimation of the Aral Sea. Located on the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and once the fourth-largest inland body of saltwater, by 2005 this global landmark had shrunk to 10% of its original size.
Sailing the Aral Sea, circa 2006
Through the efforts of Kazakhstan and the World Bank, the sea has recovered somewhat in the last few years, but there’s still a ways to go.
In the most recent episode of A Minute of Your Time, we examine Central Asia’s water issues. As you’ll see, the region’s water politics makes about as much sense as placing Lenin in front of the American University.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently said he saw “little green shoots” of new life appearing amid the economic wreckage—the Dow Jones is creeping up to old highs, Wall Street seems confident.
But as these are the people many blame for this mess in the first place, I headed down to the Manhattan’s East Village and Lower East Side—the latter dubbed the “bargain district” – to see if Bernanke is right.
A number of bartenders told me business couldn’t be better. “When times are good, people drink,” one bar manager informed me. “When times are bad, people drink.”
One self-defined “dive bar” on Avenue A proudly advertised a happy “hour” lasting from 12-8pm. Nearby, Double Down Saloon was offering a beer and a shot for just $6 (pretty much every bar said the most popular shot was whiskey).
Another told me they decided to try an experiment. Mojitos aren’t on the happy hour menu at this establishment on Houston Street, and, the bartender said, usually they do just fine with it, serving up 15 per night. Recently, however, the $9 mojitos were offered as a $4.50 happy hour special, and the bar started selling 30 to 40 in three hours. Why? It’s not just the price, says the bartender, “everyone loves a mojito, and it’s the most alcohol for the least price.”
There are also two new types of regulars these days—a bartender at a 24-hour establishment in the East Village called them “the 2pm-er: businessmen who have just been laid off, have yet to inform their families” and “the 4pm-er: people who have spent their whole day handing out resumes.”
Evidently, there are “little green shoots” a-plenty—that is, if those “shoots” are “shots” and the color is Jameson’s.
“The most common thing I hear is ‘what’s the cheapest thing in here?’” said a young blonde bartender as she poured ice into a vat. “I usually tell them, ‘You’.”
America’s just burning to break its oil addiction but can’t figure out how. (We’d turn to Sen. James Inhofe, but he declined to comment on this story.)
For one thing, there’s a lot that Republican lawmakers oppose in the recently passed Boxer-Kerry climate bill, which proposes carbon emission limits and supports clean energy alternatives. However, it occurred to us there’s one thing that might just draw the dysfunctional congressional family together – nuclear energy.
In its current form, the proposal contains relatively little nuclear support. But with a number of on-the-fence Republicans being big nuclear proponents – and President Obama hoping for a bill passed before an international climate conference in Copenhagen this winter – critics have floated the option that Obama might lean a little nuclear if it meant getting a bill out of the gate.
There are already other players in the nuclear space. As we covered in an earlier post, Russia is developing floating nuclear generators that make the energy highly accessible – and relatively cheap. South Africa and others have been developing so-called “pebble bed” reactors – with a smaller size and revamped, safer cooling system. No surprise, then, that tech-savvy American companies want in on the action too. For example, Santa Fe-based Hyperion Power Generation is developing hot tub-sized nuclear “power modules” that would cost as little as $25 million and could be on the market by 2013.
But what about the nasty waste? That issue’s a bit more dicey. In the face of stark local opposition, the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada is dead in the water – in fact, Yucca funds have reportedly been cut out of the 2011 federal fiscal budget.
However, that doesn’t mean Nevada’s anti-nuclear power. Last month Jon Hickman, mayor of White Pine County in Nevada which neighbors Yucca, made an announcement that raised some eyebrows. He proposed forming a steering committee to examine – what do you know – the construction of a new nuclear power plant.
In a small town, an honest carpenter is struck by a mysterious illness. He sells his house and belongings, leaves behind his wife and family, and moves to a nearby city to find a cure that will allow him to rebuild his old life.
But no cure comes. Though he receives some help from friends and doctors, his illness worsens, ravaging his body and rotting his fingers and toes. Unable to work, he is reduced to begging outside the gates of a church.
The story sounds almost Biblical – unrelenting punishment meted out by a capricious god. But in Kathmandu in Nepal, it is all too real.
This is the story of Ananta. Once a member of the Nepalese middle class, he now faces the most grueling poverty. His fight for basic survival continues to this day. It is a common scenario in Nepal, where health insurance and public health standards are still in nascent stages. Like thousands of others in Kathmandu and across Nepal, Ananta has no money, no insurance, and nowhere else to turn.
For years France has been the poster child for nuclear energy. Making massive investments in infrastructure since the 1960s, the French have enjoyed consistently lower electricity prices than their European neighbors, and as an added bonus they’re not beholden to unpredictable suppliers like Russia for natural gas.
However, a heat wave this summer put the French nuclear industry to the test. Many French reactors use river water for cooling, so when water temperatures rise too high, they’re forced to shut down. In July, with temperatures hovering around 30C (86F), France briefly took offline almost a third of its 60 gigawatts of nuclear generation capacity, according to the London Times. As a result, they actually had to import nuclear energy from England.
In England, the public has been far more outspoken against nuclear power and so its nuclear industry is considerably smaller. Yet they were more than happy help out their Franco brethren. Perhaps this had to do with the fact that domestic UK energy demand has dropped 6 percent due to the recession.
Whatever the tribes and tribulations of nuclear energy, Russia is convinced the future looks bright for the controversial fuel. The country’s federal atomic agency has been hard at work on a new type of nuclear power plant it believes could be popular around the world – one that floats on the sea. Learn more about it in the latest “Minute of Your Time.”
Despite calls from the Obama administration and other members of the international community, Israeli settlers continue to occupy parts of the West Bank, in violation of the Geneva Convention and Israeli law. For the Palestinians, this means continual harassment, pressure, and intimidation as settlers attempt to force them from their homes. And the ongoing power struggle within the Palestinian government isn’t helping things, either.
To the apparent consternation of the Israeli government, the issue of the settlements has been brought front and center, and it’s not something that will be settled soon, nor easily. Episode 4 of “Political Graffiti” examines the problem from the ground level.
On my first day as an intern at Film@11, I transcribed an interview—a really long interview—with an IDF reservist named Ronen Hershkovitz. This was for a program that aired on PBS in July, and I remember thinking, “This is definitely one of those intimidating IDF soldiers.” I saw the pictures of him on the battlefield in uniform, yelling at high school students, getting irritated with my correspondent (and boss).
I mentioned this one day to the correspondent, who told me that Hershkovitz used to be a camp counselor in the Poconos. I started laughing—this guy wasn’t like any camp counselor I’d ever seen. But then, I did go to music camp.
I pretty much laughed at the idea of “camp counselor” Hershkovitz for the last six weeks. And then, on my final day in the office, I got a phone call.
I thought it was the US Navy calling me back for a story (and hey, guys, I’m still waiting for that call). But then I realized whose voice it was.
That’s right. Ronen Hershkovitz. Finally I got to speak to the man I’d seen and heard all summer long—and luckily for me, he was calling to tell me I had done a good job.
Halfway through the call, I finally remembered to ask him a question: was he really a camp counselor?
Indeed, he was. In fact, he went on at great length about it.
"To see my favorite Clickable, go to 'Reporting for Duty' and check out 'Crazy Mr. Hershkovitz'!"
For the record, I still think I would’ve been scared to have him as my camp counselor, but it turned out the real guy behind the uniform wasn’t too scary after all.
Just kidding, Ronen—you actually scare the hell out of me.
—Connor Kiesel
Our recent “Minute” dealt with the effects of palm oil production on humans, animals and land. Here’s a first-hand account from our own Sabrina Chan, who grew up in Malaysia.
