Wyckoff Wednesdays at the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Center

http://vimeo.com/33460500

Seniors come to the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Center to take advantage of health services and festivities every other Wednesday. Dubbed Wyckoff Wednesdays, the biweekly event is organized by the student council at the Wyckoff Heights Medical Center.

Seniors from anywhere in New York City are welcome. The center offers blood sugar and blood pressure screenings. Afternoons culminate with bingo, pool and dancing.

On these Wednesday mornings, the senior center acts as a free clinic and a community center. The checkups are a helpful reminder, says medical student Raymond Ng, in a neighborhood where diabetes and hypertension are prevalent.

How valuable are internships?

College internship programs began to emerge in the '70s and '80s.

“Internships are, in some ways, the new “entry-level” positions, especially when jobs are tough to come by.” – Tristan Hallman, 22

College students have relied on unpaid internships as sources of college credit, job experience and networking opportunities for at least a couple of decades. Increasingly, undergrads are facing rivalry from a new wave of applicants, dubbed “adult interns,” whose B.A.s and M.A.s have already gathered a significant amount of dust. In spite of the added competition, students and graduates alike still view interning as a valid way to broaden skill sets and make valuable contacts.

The question “How valuable are internships?” was posed to 23 participants. All are college graduates with the exception of two who are in their final semesters.

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Choreographer Melissa West discusses her new project

Staten Island-based dancer and choreographer Melissa West is working on a new project tentatively named “in the eve they plant flowers” after a poem she wrote of the same name. West says she was inspired by classic literature and recent worldwide protests, including the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street.

This is West’s first time developing a dance with the aid of books.

“Normally I use paintings or visual arts, so this is very it’s very funny,” she says. “This is a very different perspective for me.”

Bushwick Daily’s editor discusses her hyperlocal blog

Bushwick Daily is a hyperlocal blog started by Katarina Hybenova in September of 2010. Within a year, the site grew from a one-a-day photo site to community spotlight blog equipped with photo essays, videos and articles. Today, Hybenova has an active staff of eight. The team covers art, music and other local culture and is moving toward hard news coverage as it begins to grow.

Hybenova talks about how and why Bushwick Daily was created, her process and a new web project that is currently in the works.

How Bushwick Daily was Born:

Dealing with Limited Work Space:

The First Virtual Bushwick Art Gallery:

 

Occupy Wall Street Cleanup Effort

Occupy Wall Street protestors engage in their first ever collective cleanup effort yesterday at their base in Zuccotti Park. They gather to fold the tents, tarps and sleeping bags that have accumulated in the weeks they’ve lived there.  Some get on their knees and scrub the floor by hand. Many unroll fresh garbage bags and don rubber gloves. Most of the supplies – mops, brooms, Windex, etc. – were donated.

Protestors organized the event to avoid being expelled from the park on charges of an unsanitary environment. The Department of Sanitation scheduled to clean the park today. Rumors that the NYPD could try to bar the protestors from returning and the activists are not taking any chances.

 

560,000 employees silent in the face of USPS’s extensive downsizing plan


The United States Postal Service is struggling to remain afloat in light of a possible default and is cutting services in the process. Overnight mail delivery is being done away with and entire mail processing locations are being closed.

While many are afraid that service might slow down, no one seems to be worried about the jobs that are about to disappear.

There are about 3,700 local post offices that are slated to close or be replaced with “village post offices” within a few months. 252 mail processing centers are also under review right now. These centers alone account for 35,000 workers.

The Postal Service already lost 110,000 employees when it closed the doors of about 200 facilities over the last four years.

USPSAccording to the Postmaster General, “35 percent of the Postal Service’s retail revenue comes from expanded access locations such as grocery stores, drug stores, office supply stores, retail chains, self-service kiosks, ATMs and usps.com, open 24/7.”

The proposition is to increase this number, severing the careers of countless postal service employees and giving their work to machines. This has happened to a much smaller degree before but during the prosperous time of the 90s when the Internet hadn’t yet uprooted many traditional business models and cultivated the grounds for other interesting and innovative ones.

Why isn’t anyone talking about the hundreds of thousands of people who soon may have to look to unemployment benefits to survive if they can’t secure another job? The American Postal Workers Union says they feel betrayed by the Postal Service, but what are workers saying?

Twitterverse A-Flutter with Jobs Speech Tweets

If only jobs were trending this powerfully in a flesh-and-blood world faced with another threat of worldwide economic crisis and soon-to-de defunct Postal Service systems. Many flocked to Twitter at the start the president’s much anticipated speech about The American Jobs Act, with its $450 billion price tag, and the chitter-chatter soon became disharmonious.

My son Sawyer started crying when I put #jobsnow speech on. Should of known it was a sign of things to come #liberalfail,” said @Mansdoerfer at 9:01 P.M., using the popular Twitter “hashtags” to link to related tweets.

R. T. Rybak, the mayor of blue state Minneapolis, MN, felt differently. “Every day the American Jobs Act doesn’t get passed there are unemployed Americans who could be working. Get it done, Congress!” he tweeted supportively.

Some praised the speech’s delivery while others displayed their support of the bill by reposting quotes from the speech. Here are some popular jobs quotes:

  • “The American Jobs Act will not add to the deficit. It will be paid for.”
  •  “Pass this jobs bill, and put our teachers back in the classroom where they belong.”
  • “The people who hired us to work for them don’t have the luxury of waiting 14 months.”

And it is not surprising that there are those who have reservations. @ifdyperez writes: “Show me, don’t tell me, Mr. President. I’ll tell you what I think when I can see the details. #jobspeech.”

Can’t argue with that.

Five Media Lists that were Created for the Sole Purpose of Generating Page Views

Some people make lists to ease the stress of shopping. Others list to organize every aspect of their lives. Still others make lists out of an obsessive compulsion. Journalists, it appears, are compiling lists for either or both of two reasons: the bleak prospects of the field have worn some so thin that they have become physically incapable of writing paragraphs; or they have surrendered to the phenomenon of Whore Journalism – the media’s page hit race.

Examples:

5 Tips For GOP Frontrunner Rick Perry To Win Tonight’s Debate

A list written less for the benefit of the public figure in question and more for that of the opposing audience. See also: Anthony Weiner.

7 Sites You Should Be Wasting Time On Right Now

Equipped with Bangable Dudes in History, this list is ratable and interactive.

Top Five Places to Find the Rich and Single

Cleverly arranged statistics. To access articles of substance located to the right of this WSJ piece, one can choose to subscribe.

An Illegal Alien’s Guide to the Top Five Best Places to Live In America

An attention-grabbing headline accompanying a story largely lacking facts.

Top Three Celebrity Food Products

Top three lists always feel the most incomplete.