Long Island Food Not Bombs

Very Awesome - Hempstead "chapter" of LIFNB take action with very impressive results. The below article is from NEWSDAY.


Group shares vegetarian food with 800 in Hempstead
November 21, 2010 by JENNIFER BARRIOS

A spicy aroma of pumpkin filled the air in the Hempstead Long Island Rail Road parking lot Sunday, as volunteers from Long Island Food Not Bombs brought out boxes of homemade vegan entrees along with thousands of pounds of groceries to share with the men, women, and children who waited eagerly for the goods.

Hundreds of people clutched plastic shopping bags and waited patiently as about 100 volunteers from the group unloaded box after box of vegetables, bread, fruit, cereal and prepared items, and carried them to tables that lined Columbia Street.

Leo Hatcher, 48, of Hempstead, filled his wheeled cart with bread, rolls, organic canned tomatoes and cookies.

"I'm just here to put some food in the cabinets," said Hatcher, who added that his food stamps often run out before the end of the month. "This is pretty much what I really needed."

Long Island Food Not Bombs co-founder Jon Stepanian said the group brought about 30,000 pounds of vegetarian food - edible, but unable to be sold by the grocery stores and food distributors that donated it - to the parking lot for its Thanksgiving Food Share Bonanza. They estimated about 800 people showed up during the day.

The group doesn't distribute turkeys or other meats, but organizers aimed to provide everything else that goes along with a traditional Thanksgiving feast. Stepanian said the groceries provided Sunday will keep people from having to choose between buying food and paying utility bills.

"We take a little bit of that pressure off," he said.

Long Island Food Not Bombs is part of an international movement that helps to distribute edible food that would otherwise be discarded because it is slightly damaged or is close to its expiration date for freshness. Stepanian said the group doesn't consider itself as giving away food, but sharing it.

"We don't believe in charity - we believe food is a right," he said.

Volunteer Jessica Feldman spent her day off from work Sunday helping to move the crowds of people along the different tables.

Feldman, an employee of Whole Foods - one of the grocers that provides food for Food Not Bombs - said she started to volunteer with the group after she became curious about what they did with the vegetables her employer donated to them.

"As soon as I went to one share, I was hooked," said Feldman, 23. "Once you see a child who needs food and you give food to them, it's a beautiful thing."

Angie Houseworth, 42, of Hempstead, said she waited at the railroad parking lot for hours before the food distribution began, and came away with her wheeled cart filled to the brim with fresh organic produce and even a bouquet of flowers.

Houseworth said both she and her husband are out of work, and she was grateful for the overflowing cart.

"We were all trying to get everything together for the holidays," she said. "It makes a big difference."

microsoft trashes open office - come on!

From Yahoo NEWS: A recent Microsoft video suggests the company considers OpenOffice.org a significant threat to its own Office suite.

Titled "A Few Perspectives on OpenOffice.org," the video features a series of horror stories from customers who tried the open-source productivity suite and suffered from excess costs as well as IT resources, performance and compatibility issues.

A series of customer quotes flashes across the screen in the slickly animated video, read aloud by a series of unseen narrators. "If an open-source freeware solution breaks, who's going to fix it?" according to a statement ascribed to a school district official in the U.S.

"When we returned to Microsoft Office after our experience with OpenOffice, you could practically hear a collective sigh of relief across the entire district," states another comment attributed to a U.S. school system official.

Comments are not enabled on the video's YouTube page.

Microsoft is facing competition from OpenOffice.org on multiple fronts, from the commercial version sold by project owner Oracle, as well as offshoots like the recently announced LibreOffice.

Oracle this week sought to dispel any doubts about its commitment to OpenOffice.org, saying it would participate in an ODF (Open Document Format) Plugfest event in Brussels and pledging continued development support on the OpenOffice.org codebase.

An Oracle spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Microsoft's ad.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

Growing Your Greens

Maximizing the use of his front lawn, this guy John has redefined his suburban landscape by utilizing the entire area to grow vegetables. What will the neighbors think?

The Garden - now on dvd.

Just picked up this dvd the other day. Great film, makes you angry and inspired to get out there and do it. Fight the power and garden.

Crass-ical collection

The CRASS-ical collection - direct from the Southern Records crew: The Crassical Collection is finally here, and the first release is the newly remastered The Feeding of the Five Thousand. After several years of being out of print, this legendary album has been been restored from the original analogue studio tapes, repackaged and bolstered by rare and unreleased tracks, and stunning new artwork from Gee Vaucher, who has lovingly created what could only be considered a real artefact. Included in this package is a 64-page booklet featuring all lyrics along with extensive liner notes from band members Penny Rimbaud and Steve Ignorant, which shed light on the making of the record. Also included is CD-sized recreation of the iconic original fold-out poster sleeve.

“We were setting out as purists: hard, uncompromising and utterly bemused.”

The Feeding of the 5000 is the first album by Crass, released in 1978. The record came to be made when Pete Stennett, owner of Small Wonder Records, heard a demo that the band had recorded. Impressed by all of the material, he decided that rather than release a conventional single by the band, he would put all of their set onto an 18 track 12 inch EP.

“Easy listening? You ain't heard nothing yet.”

AmeriKKK@ Off Line!

Photocopy and destroy. The mission. shake shit up, tell it like it is, don't kiss the bosses ass, rage against the machine... that is if that's your choice for a zine. Or keep up with the Kardashians, the latest powder puff pop punk tart rock radio tedium. Your choice. In the world of xerox zinedom you're putting your money where you mouth is.
The biggest obstacles I faced in the years of publishing (besides being horrible with deadlines, a self depricating, over-analytical humdrum) was having enough money to maintain my computer system to keep everything up and running.
Before the whole world went to the web, i had a h/p printer, corel draw, some bad pagemaker knock off, an electric typewritter, glue, paste and access to a xerox machine that was able to enlarge and/or reduce [very revolutionary function] in it's day. I added a scsi xerox machine which caused all sorts of hardware headaches which I'm not going to get into. Since they could've been resolved knowing the right people, but most of my peers were all about gaming systems rather than computers.
Other things that made my primitive system complete was the fact that i had a fairly large font library. I was able to do some layout for cassette demos that took a million years to print out. Then I'd head over to the new Kinkos and run off the cards on decent stock paper.
BUT wait, I was writing about not having enough money to keep my system up to date. Nowadays there are awesome alternatives to the expensive software that I was using. The biggest reason I would say why you should publish a zine these days is probably more narcissitic in the sense that it documents YOUR existence. Plus it's semi permanent. Most of the shit that I posted online in "blogs" and or geocities no longer exists. Dead files and they don't even show up on archive.org's wayback machine.
So where do I start? A great program for word processing and a sweet alternative to MS Office is Open Office. It's free and beats having to use a commodore 64 and an old electric typewriter. I can't say enough good things about this program, it's compatible with your major file types.
To set up/layout your zine I recommend scribnus . If you've ever heard people talk about pagemaker or quark this is certainly up to par with those programs if you're using it to make a zine.
If you have photos that you're going to use in your zine, GIMP will be useful to manipulate them in the same manner that photoshop would help you out. If you're looking for a nifty program that will also help you with tweaking photos and incorporating graphics into your zine, you can use Inkscape which is right up there with corel draw and illustrator. If you need fonts to jazz up your lay out check out dafont.com .

Free Software for Free Systems!!!

article here
You say you want a revolution? While it's safe to be cynical about the present and be nostalgic about the past, there are genuine movements of movers and shakers that may unknowingly have embraced the philosophies of the old guard. Which in turn have helped past ideals and concepts to remain relevant.
Free software foundation is a great place to start if you're looking for the untelevised revolution. Rather than reiterate their mission statements and ideas. I'm going to be a lazy bastard and include a link which you'll find up above. Having a limited amount of funds and really can't afford to buy all these updates for the latest top of the pops software, it's great to see programmers and developers who are genuinely not "doing evil" or trying to candy coatin' their strange new (oppressive regime) bedfellows as just consulting adults behaving naughty. Stand up for our future, support FSF and the endeavors they are presenting.