The Society of Jesus was founded in 1540 by Ignatius Loyola and six of his fellow students in Paris. The formal approval of the order by Pope Paul III was the culmination of a pledge of companionship taken by the students in chapel in 1534. And that experience, itself, was the result of a conversion process begun in 1521 when the 30-year-old Inigo Lopez de Loyola was wounded on the battlefield. During his convalescence, Inigo had access to very limited reading material – a few religious books. Turning his mind toward the things of God, he began to pray, fast, and do penance. In time, he decided to become a priest, and thus took up studies in Paris where the “company” was born.

One of the distinguishing aspects of the Jesuits throughout history, and all followers of Ignatian spirituality, is the unique spiritual preparation and discipline developed by Ignatius Loyola. Out of his own conversion experience, Ignatius began to write a manual of “exercises” to deepen one’s relationship with the Lord. Most likely started in 1522, the work was continuously adapted and developed until its initial publication in 1548. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola is a classic of Christian Spirituality and the hallmark of Jesuit preparation. Today people in all walks of life are discovering its rich treasures and making it their own resource to spiritual growth.

Throughout the world today, over 21,000 men live and work as Jesuit priests, brothers, novices, and scholastics. The Society of Jesus is the largest religious order in the Catholic Church. Organized world-wide in 85 administrative units called provinces, the order is led by a Superior General in Rome. In the United States, there are 10 provinces. These make up what is known as the American Assistancy, headquartered at the Jesuit Conference in Washington, DC.

From the New York Province of Jesuits

The average household’s weekly waste has enough energy to power a TV for two years.

See more garbage statistics from an amazing infographic at Recycle.co.uk.

Six brokers sat at a conference table in Chelsea last week comparing woes. They were from competing firms, but they had one thing in common: unsold listings in the Urban Glass House, the Spring Street condo that was Philip Johnson’s final architectural statement. Nearly a third of its 40 units were bought within weeks of its debut in 2005—and then sales stalled. Not one apartment has been resold in five years. (A sponsor unit is just now in contract.) Six have been on the market for months. Four have been marked down, from 6 to 17 percent, and nearly all are asking about the same price or below what they first fetched. A tenth-floor two-bedroom closed in 2006 for $2.469 million; today, it’s listed at $1.895 million and has been since September.

The fickle market is certainly part of this. But another problem lies across the street, where the city plans to put a garage for the Department of Sanitation. Even on this unpolished fringe of Soho, it seems, you can have a little too much grit. Core’s Tom Postilio says, “People come in and they like the product, the building,” but the DSNY garage “is a psychological barrier.” Agrees Corcoran’s Adrian Noriega: “They hear ‘Sanitation,’ and they get scared,” even though the garage won’t be handling actual trash, just trucks.

Early this year, a judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by neighborhood groups to stop the garage. Carole De Saram, president of the Tribeca Community Association, says they’re appealing this summer. Owners in the neighborhood are in a cautious, watch-and-wait mood. “To add a building that should be in a manufacturing area will affect property values, no question,” says Stas Zakrzewski, who lives four blocks from the site. De Saram, a former real-estate agent, says she’s befuddled by the city’s decision, considering that the area was rezoned in 2003 to encourage residential building. “Who the hell in their right mind puts a garbage facility near developments that cost hundreds of millions of dollars?”

Read more from “Garbage In, Garbage Out: What happens when a Department of Sanitation garage is your new neighbor?” by S.Jhoanna Robledo, published July 4, 2010 at New York Magazine.

New Yorkers across the five boroughs will get the opportunity to express themselves musically this summer as part of Sing For Hope and Make Music New York’s “Play Me I’m Yours” program. The two-week citywide event will feature 60 pianos placed in public spaces throughout New York City.

On June 17, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, joined by City Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer (D-Sunnyside), Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate D. Levin and Luke Jerram, the artist who conceived the project, announced the start of the event at Gantry Plaza State Park in Long Island City. The park, which overlooks the East River and the Manhattan skyline, is one of five Queens locations where the pianos will be placed.

The program officially started on June 21 at Make Music New York’s one-day music festival that featured more than 1,000 free performances in all five boroughs. Available until July 5, the pianos will be individually decorated by local artists, student volunteers, New Yorkers and visitors from around the world who will be encouraged to play them. The “Play Me, I’m Yours” installation is presented by the nonprofit organization Sing for Hope, in partnership with Make Music New York and the city of New York.

From “Play Me, I’m Yours” by Jason D. Antos, published June 23, 2010, at The Queens Gazette.

Listen up, you heinous little motherfuckers. I am not playing. Before I deliver the grim news of your collective fates, let me give you a brief synopsis of how you have driven me to the brink of insanity over the last three months. Here it is.

Unfortunately, because I am paying over $400 a month in student loans and am therefore very cheap, I made the mistake of accepting a used mattress from a coworker to put on top of my new bed frame and box springs. So. You and I have, by my calculations, been residing together since May. MAY. That’s when I unwittingly brought you and your home into my bedroom. That’s when I became your new food source. Your “host.”

You guys are pretty tricky, I have to tell you. I mean, when I started seeing little purple dots on my toes in the morning, I did what you wanted me to do, which was to blame them on anything and everything under the sun except you. This is because I was wholly unaware that such hideous creatures as yourselves existed. I figured it was a spider, so I vacuumed profusely. Then I thought it was mosquitos, so I busted out the Off. Nothing seemed to be working. But you know this already, don’t you? Yes, you snacked on me all through the month of June, getting your fill of my blood while I snored on, retreating back to the crevices of my mattress just before dawn, leaving no sign or trail.

Ahhh, June. What a peaceful, sane month. Ignorance, in this case, was truly bliss.

But then came July and with July came some strange occurances. You multiplied, didn’t you? Got a little more hungry, huh? You must have because that’s when my body started to revolt against whatever it is you injected me with when you were gnawing on my flesh. See, I started having these weird allergic reactions. Getting hives for no reason at all. So I changed my laundry detergent to something dye-free, fragrance-free. That didn’t work. Then I changed my soap to something hypoallergenic. No, that didn’t work either. And the hives kept getting worse, until one morning, I woke up with not only hives all over my chest and back, but about twenty purple dots on my feet, which I (ignorance, remember) attributed to the allergies. Remember that morning, my little roommates? Do you? That’s the morning my throat swelled shut and I had to be rushed to the emergency room.

You had us all stumped, from the ER doc to the allergist. They ran tests, researched, poked, prodded, scraped… All to no avail. The diagnosis? I was allergic to myself, because they could find nothing that I was allergic to otherwise. I was ALLERGIC TO MYSELF?? Yes, that was the diagnosis. But they were so very wrong, weren’t they? You guys are so slick as to leave bites that disappear pretty quickly and could be ANYTHING, right? So I took my Allegra and went to sleep every night and you fed on, didn’t you?

Then came August. I was dealing with being hivey all the time and rashy some of the time and generally very uncomfortable, but I was dealing, you know? And then you showed your faces. Literally. See, I have it figured out now. The grandaddy of all bedbugs came to play, didn’t he? He must have been starving because he gave me three bites I just couldn’t ignore. I mean, these were nasty, bright red and the size of a penny and really fucking itchy. That’s when the lightbulb went on, bitches. There was something FUNKY going on in my bedroom and I was on to you, I just didn’t have a clue that you were so stealthy. Really, you are. But I looked you up. God bless the internet. Yep, I Googled your asses and when I typed in “bites while sleeping,” there you were. You are some ugly motherfuckers, too. I’m not just saying that because you’ve been stealing my blood without my knowledge or consent, either. You are really ugly.

This is where the insanity begins, because in order to prove that you really were cohabitating with me, I had to willingly and knowingly be your food and catch you eating me. This, as you know, meant sleeping (and I use the word “sleeping” very loosely at this point) with a flashlight beside me and waking up intermittently throughout the night for five nights straight to examine my body and catch you in the middle of snacktime. Thing is, you instinctively knew I wasn’t sleeping, didn’t you? So you held out for as long as you could. But one of you was weaker than the rest. He couldn’t last, he couldn’t hang and he gave you up, huh?

So there I was, reading my book, completely not expecting you guys for several more hours when he ran out from under my sheet, straight past my nose, towards the edge of the bed. Now I told you before and I’ll tell you again: I am not playing. I smashed that motherfucker so fast he had no clue what hit him. And what came flying out of his crushed body? Come on, you know. YES! MY BLOOD!!

Alright, bitches. I have you now. I saved his corpse. I bought a magnifying glass. I called Terminix and I slept on the living room floor for two nights. And when Drew, the friendly Terminix employee, showed up at my door last night, I told him straight out what I have already told you twice: I am not playing. Drew and I threw out the evil devil spawn mattress. We threw out the box springs. We threw out the fan, the bookcase, the books, everything in the back closet. All of it, gone. GONE, I tell you. And then Drew, my new best friend, sprayed the FUCK out of the entire house. I was not playing. He said it probably would be okay to just get the bedroom. Fuck that. You bitches have been giving me hives for three fucking months now. You’re dead, it’s over. We left no crack unsprayed, no piece of funiture unbombed. That’s right, assholes, I BOMBED YOUR ASSES. TWICE. And tomorrow, I’m coming for the couch and chairs. They’re history. As I said, you’re pretty slick, so I can see you thinking you can make a new home in my living room. Go fuck yourselves. And if any of you survived the initial attacks, be warned. Drew and I have a little deal and it’s called HE’S COMING BACK in two weeks to bomb you again. And then he will come back once every 90 days for the next YEAR. So be prepared. YOU WILL DIE. I am not playing.

From “An Open Letter to My Bedbugs” posted on Craigslist, August 19, 2006.

On Roosevelt Island, a narrow strip of land in New York’s East River, no one takes their trash to the curb. They just drop it down a chute, anywhere on the island, and pneumatic pipes take care of the rest.

The infrastructural curiosity is the subject of Juliette Spertus’ Fast Trash!, an exhibition that looks at Roosevelt Island’s unique system in the context of how we might better design our cities in the future. The Island’s Automated Vacuum Collection System sucked its first junk in 1975 and is used by over 12,000 of the island’s inhabitants today. Here’s Spertus on how the system works:

Garbage is deposited in a regular building garbage chute, which is gravity-fed, and piles up behind a valve at the bottom. With your average garbage chute, there is a compactor at the bottom that compacts the trash and puts it into bags that are then carried to the curb. Here, there is no compactor – there’s just a plate and a network of tubes that lead to a facility at the end of the island…The valves open, the garbage drops in and is pulled back to the facility with an air speed of 60 miles per hour (the garbage itself, depending on the density, shoots through at 30-60 miles per hour). A cyclone separator then separates the heavy items from the light, after which a dust collector removes the dust from the air, and the all the garbage and dust drops into a compactor and is condensed into one of 10 containers in the facility that are then picked up by the Department of Sanitation.

From Gizmodo. For more information go to Fast Trash.

According to some experts, the sun is our best source of renewable, clean energy. Some estimate that the sun can produce 10,000 times as much energy as the Earth uses at the turn of the 21st century. The future of solar energy depends mostly on how it is applied, rather than whether it would be enough energy to be a viable world power source.

The largest problem facing the future of solar energy is the space required to build solar power plants. A solar plant is comprised of thousands of solar panels, not unlike those currently installed on alternative energy homes. Because of this, solar plants require a consistently sunny area and a considerable amount of space. Currently, the one of the largest solar power stations in the world covers more than 10 square miles (16.9 km squared) and creates enough power to run about 200,000 homes. Some experts suggest that to provide power for the entire United States, an area approximately 100 miles (160.9 km) per side would be required, probably somewhere in the desert climate of the American Southwest.

Although there are many reasons to believe that the future of solar energy is bright and coming soon, the answer really lies in the hands of the world’s citizens. In a world largely governed by economics and politics, what ordinary citizens choose to buy and support will dictate the trends of the future. By installing solar panels, donating to research organizations involved in alternative energies, majoring in science or engineering, and voting for measures that give money to alternative energy development, anyone can influence the future of solar energy.

From WiseGeek

“East Fifth Bliss,” the first novel by former East Village resident Douglas Light, is being adapted into an independent film by Michael Knowles. The filming starts this month in the East Village. “Dexter”/”Six Feet Under” star Michael C. Hall plays the title character of this darkly comic tale. Per the description: “At age 35, Morris Bliss is clamped in the jaws of New York City inertia: he wants to travel but has no money; he needs a job but has no prospects; he still shares a walk-up apartment with his father. Enter Stefani, an 18-year-old girl in a catholic school uniform, and Morris’s once static life quickly unravels… ‘East Fifth Bliss’ follows Morris as he confronts the intricate and often confusing aspects of relationships, family and identity.”

Read an interview with Douglas Light, the author of “East Fifth Bliss” at EV Grieve.

With the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day approaching the city is proposing a greatly expanded recycling program. The proposed legislation hopes to divert more than eight thousand tons of plastic every year away from landfills and incinerators.

Speaker Christine Quinn and other city officials have proposed an idea for the expansion of the residential recycling program.  Regulations were last modified in 1989, when the bill was first introduced.

“We’re incredibly excited to be introducing a package of bills that will dramatically expand and overhaul the way we recycle here in New York City,” said Speaker Quinn.

The city’s original comprehensive residential recycling law, Local Law 19, was the first of its kind in the U.S. It required recyclables to be collected for every residential building in New York City as well as mandating collection from every commercial building.

But with the amount of waste produced in the city having changed in the last 20 years, an upgrade is long overdue.

“As consumers and businesses generate more waste each year, this legislation will help make New York City a leader in recycling,” said Council Member Karen Koslowitz. “More specifically, we need to ensure that yard waste will be composted as opposed to being added to our already overcrowded landfills”.

Since the closure of the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island in 2002, the city spends more than $300 million each year disposing garbage in places as far as Ohio and West Virginia. With the development of the new Sims recycling facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn recyclables will be processed here in the city, reducing our carbon footprint.

Some of the proposed initiatives and improvements.

• Expand plastic recycling to include all rigid plastic containers, including items such as yogurt tubs, take out containers and medicine bottles
• The Department of Sanitation will be required to place 300 new recycling bins around the city on over the next three years
• One city-sponsored household hazardous waste collection event in each borough every year
• Establishment of a voluntary manufacturer and retailer take-back program for unwanted household paint, which makes up to 50 percent of household hazardous waste
• Every school within the Department of Education would have to designate a recycling coordinator and provide recycling receptacles at entrances, lunch rooms, and each classroom
• Establishment of a new leaf and yard waste composting facility in Queens or Brooklyn.

From “New Plans Proposed for Recycled Waste in the City” by Erica Butler, published April 12, 2010 at NBC New York.

It is unclear at the exact time in which eggs were brought into the Christian celebration of Easter, but some scholars suggest that during medieval times seems the most likely. It was during this period that strict practices such as lent were enforced by the church, and eggs were not allowed to be eaten during the Lenten time. On account of this, eggs that were collected during Lent were sent to the priest for blessing, and many of them were dyed red in remembrance of the blood of Christ. After Lent the eggs were once again a part of the Christian diet and were feasted upon, becoming a main item of the Easter dinner.

There are many theories about the origin of the Easter Egg, for more go to Helium.com.