With so many bars turning their attention to the craft of the quality cocktail, it can be easy to assume that the concept has saturated the bar market. That’s not true, sadly, and — depending on where you live — it can be hard to track down a well-made cocktail in your neighborhood. There’s no reason why you have to actually leave the house to drink in style, however. A new online teaching program called Drink Skool, created by some of the most respected names in the beverage industry, cuts out the middle-man and gives you the basics on how to turn your own bar into a craft cocktail haven. And unlike most DIY home-improvement projects, the worst that can happen here if you screw up is you get to make another cocktail. Sounds like a win-win.

Drink Skool is “definitely for consumers who have some enthusiasm and have some base knowledge about spirits and cocktails, or bartenders that are getting started, but not anything above that,” one of the partners, Doug Frost (also of the industry standard advanced training program Beverage Alcohol Resource — and one of the more renowned wine experts in the world) explains. “What we’ve tried to do, is distill it — sorry for the pun — into bite-sized chunks so people can go, ‘Ok I got that.’” As Frost points out, mixing a perfect cocktail isn’t exactly rocket science; it’s all about following a recipe and locking down a few standard techniques, all of which the — totally free — course walks users through online with a sense of fun and a sense of humor. “I would hope the outcome of what we’re doing is someone will go, ‘This isn’t that hard,’  buy a few a things and start making their own cocktails,” says Frost. “There’s no reason they can’t.”

Among the program’s lessons are the basics of mixing a cocktail, learning how to taste and appreciate the differences between types of spirits, and important bar techniques like muddling.

It’s an attempt to demystify the concept of mixology, Frost says. “I’m hoping that people will take some time to try a couple of techniques, at least for their favorite cocktails, and end up recognizing that there’s no great mystery in this,” he explains. “Instead it’s about measuring, buying better quality products, and using fresh ingredients. You don’t cook with canned stuff and expect it to taste wonderful.”

Get Skooled:

Right off the bat, there are two crucial things home cocktail enthusiasts need to learn, Frost says. First is the difference between shaking and stirring. Get a stirrer, he says, anything will do, but a nice long-handled spoon is best. “Learn to stir so you don’t break the ice up, and all you do is chill down the drink.” Shaking is for when you want a cocktail to be light and airy because it has bubbles in it; learning to know which recipe works best with either technique is a fundamental place to start. Also of primary importance, he says, is freshness — what he calls “the foundation of what has changed mixology in the U.S.” There’s no substitute for fresh juice, he asserts. “If somebody’s squeezing fresh juice, it’s mind-blowing what happens to flavor of that cocktail as opposed to a mix.”

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Speaking at the first of two “community conversations” on the fate of the school, parents and residents of the community discussed whether to return children to the school or demolish it and build a memorial on the grounds.

Frantic parents who arrived at the school following the December 14 shooting had been directed to a nearby firehouse to learn the fate of their children.

“Unless you were a parent of a Sandy Hook student that day and had to walk to that firehouse, you don’t know how we feel,” Christine Wilford, the mother of two children who survived the shooting, said during her turn at the microphones set up in an auditorium at nearby Newtown High School.

“On that day, I looked around and it was my Sandy Hook family,” said Wilford, who echoed what most parents said at the meeting, which was they wanted to hear what families said privately about the facility’s future before deciding her own preference.

The mass killings plunged Newtown, a rural New England town of 27,000 residents about 70 miles northeast of New York City, into grief, along with much of the rest of the nation.

The shootings prompted President Barack Obama to place Vice President Joe Biden at the head of a task force that will find ways to curb gun violence. Biden is due to submit the recommendations as early as Tuesday.

The vice president has said he will recommend universal background checks for gun buyers and new limits on the capacity of magazines like those used by the Connecticut gunman. Gun rights groups said on Sunday that these restrictions would fail in Congress.

The elementary school remains closed to everyone but police investigating the attack. Its students, more than 400 children in kindergarten through fourth grade, have been relocated to a school in the neighboring town of Monroe.

Newtown First Selectman Patricia Llodra told the audience that the final decision on the school’s fate will come only after months of discussions with other groups, including teachers who were there during the shooting and families that lost children.

“The process ahead of us will take months,” Llodra said. “But we need to bring our Sandy Hook students home.”

‘AN ABSOLUTE INJUSTICE’

Merim Bajraliu, a senior at the high school whose sister attended Sandy Hook, said knocking the school down only increases the damage caused by the gunman.

“Some of my best childhood memories were at Sandy Hook school,” Bajraliu said. “I don’t think a psychopath should take this away from us. Razing the school would be an absolute injustice to those whose lives were cut short that day.”

Several parents agreed with Bajraliu, saying their children are asking to return to the school.

And yet one father who asked not to be identified said his first grader has said he never wanted to step foot in the school again, nor does his wife. He asked that whatever decision is made about the school’s future, that families be given the opportunity to attend any other school in the district.

Despite the differences, most of the parents agreed not to separate the children from their classmates.

“You can’t divide those kids up. They’ve been through too much,” said Jodi Markowski, mother of a second grader. “It’s not too soon. I want them to know where they are going to school.”

Families who lost children in the massacre are scheduled to meet town officials in the upcoming weeks, Llodra said. She is also meeting with the affected teachers in the temporary school.

Authorities have not offered a motive for the attack. The gunman, Adam Lanza, 20, killed his mother before driving to the school. He shot himself dead following the rampage.

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School officials are preparing for droves of anxious parents to join the fleet of buses carting children to a disused middle school in the neighboring town of Monroe. Chalk Hill Middle School, closed about a year and half ago, has been hastily refurbished in the three weeks since the December 14 attack and renamed Sandy Hook Elementary School.

With their children’s safety foremost on parents’ and officials’ minds in the wake of the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, the school has been outfitted with a new security system. Monroe Police Department officers will patrol the grounds, and all outside doorways and sidewalks will be under surveillance.

“I think right now we have to make this the safest school in America,” Monroe Police Lieutenant Keith White said at a press conference on Wednesday.

Parents wishing to remain with their kids, ages 5 to 10 in kindergarten through grade 4, will be allowed to accompany them to their classrooms and afterwards may stay in the school’s “lecture room” for as long as they like, according to a memo to parents on the school’s website. Counseling will be available for students and parents at the new school, about 7 miles south of the scene of the shooting.

“I’m not sure I’m ready yet to totally let them go,” Sandy Hook parent Sarah Swansiger said on CNN about her trepidation over the return to school.

When the students return around 9 a.m. Thursday, they will find all of the belongings they left behind when teachers and police evacuated them from Sandy Hook nearly three weeks ago after Adam Lanza burst through the school doors and opened fire.

They will be welcomed to a building that has been decked out as a “Winter Wonderland” with the help of thousands of kids from around the world.

“This does not look like the other elementary school,” Newtown School Superintendent Janet Robinson said emphatically.

In the meantime, no new details have emerged to explain why the 20-year-old Lanza, armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle, two other firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, targeted the school.

Described by family friends as having Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, Lanza shot and killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, at their home about 5 miles from the school before driving to Sandy Hook and embarking on the massacre, police said. He then took his own life as police were arriving at the school, which had an enrollment of 456.

Police have offered no firm motive for the attack, and state police investigators have said it could be months before they finish their report.

The massacre in Newtown, a rural New England town of 27,000 residents about 70 miles northeast of New York City, stunned the nation, prompting President Barack Obama to call it the worst day of his presidency and reigniting an extensive debate on gun control. Obama has tasked Vice President Joe Biden with assembling a package of gun-control proposals to submit to Congress in the next several weeks.

The National Rifle Association, the most powerful gun-rights lobby in the United States, has rebuffed calls for more stringent firearms restrictions and instead called for armed guards to patrol every public school in the country.

The post Sandy Hook kids head to school for first time since attack appeared first on Metro.us.

But among the normal sounds of a school day – teachers reading to children, the scratch of pencil on paper – students will hear new ones, including the murmur of grief counselors and the footsteps of police officers.

Four days after 20-year-old Adam Lanza strode into Sandy Hook Elementary school and gunned down a score of 6- and 7-year-olds, in addition to six faculty and staff, that school will remain closed. It is an active crime scene, with police coming and going past a line of 26 Christmas trees that visitors have decorated with ornaments, stuffed animals and balloons in the school colors of green and white as a memorial to the victims.

The massacre – one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history – shocked Americans, prompting some lawmakers to call for tighter restrictions on guns and causing school administrators around the country to assess their safety protocols.

Newtown police plan to have officers at the six schools scheduled to reopen on Tuesday, trying to offer a sense of security to the students and faculty, many of whom spent the weekend in mourning. Newtown Police Lieutenant George Sinko acknowledged it may be difficult to ease the worries of the roughly 4,700 returning students and their families.

“Obviously, there’s going to be a lot of apprehension. We just had a horrific tragedy. We had babies sent to school that should be safe and they weren’t,” Sinko said. “You can’t help but think … if this could happen again.”



DAY FOR ‘HEALING’

Newtown High School Principal Charles Dumais, in an e-mail to parents, said schools in the district would open two hours later than usual, with counselors available to students and their families.

“This is a day to start healing,” Dumais said.

While school officials have not yet decided when Sandy Hook students will resume their studies, the building that they will move into – the unused Chalk Hill School in the nearby town of Monroe – already showed signs of preparation.

On a fence opposite the building, a green sign with white lettering proclaimed “Welcome Sandy Hook Elementary!”

In Washington, the massacre prompted U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday to call a White House meeting with advisors to discuss ways to respond, a first step toward fulfilling the pledge he made a day earlier in Newtown. The administration’s plans to curb violence include but are not limited to gun-control measures, a spokesman said.

Police have warned it could take months for them to finish their investigation into the attack, which started when Adam Lanza killed his mother, Nancy, at home, before driving to the school armed with a Bushmaster AR 15 rifle and two handguns. After shooting 26 people at the school, he turned his gun on himself when he heard police approaching.

In total, 28 people died in the incident.

Many of the students and faculty of Sandy Hook and its neighbors will still have funerals to attend.

The first two victims, Noah Pozner and Jack Pinto, both 6, were buried on Monday, with the boys’ bodies laid out in white coffins. Jack was dressed in a New York Giants jersey with his favorite player’s number, while mourners left a teddy bear outside Noah’s service.

More funerals were expected on Tuesday, for victims including James Mattioli and Jessica Rekos. Each was 6 years old.

“It’s still not real that my little girl, who was so full of life and who wants a horse so badly and who’s going to get cowgirl boots for Christmas isn’t coming home,” Krista Rekos, Jessica’s mother, told ABC News on Monday.

The post Newtown students to return to classes in wake of school massacre appeared first on Metro.us.

The new images show a fully-built campus that sprawls across Roosevelt Island, along with an inside view of the campus’ first academic building. The school is expected to open in 2017, though officials predict it will not be fully built until 2037.

The city accepted the bid for the campus put in by Cornell University and its partner, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in December 2011. Cornell Tech has since been in a land use review process to determine the best plans for the 12-acre site.

“We are determined to innovate in every aspect of the development, from the way that students, faculty, researchers, industry and the local community are intermingled, to the sustainability of our buildings and their iconic architecture,” Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of Cornell Tech, said.

According to the latest plans, a pedestrian walkway will run through the center of the campus, connecting all of its buildings and leading to a green space called Four Freedoms park.

The university’s academic building is also expected to be “net-zero energy,” meaning its energy needs will be sustained through a rooftop photo-voltaic canopy.

The latest renderings come after Cornell Tech officials said they held talks with people who live and work near the site of the campus.  

“While we officially start the public review process today, Cornell Tech has worked hard over the past nine months to create a robust dialogue with our new neighbors on Roosevelt Island and across the city,” Cathy Dove, vice president of Cornell Tech. “The campus plan was designed to be open to everyone, and we look forward to sharing this unique vision with all New Yorkers over the next seven months and beyond.”

The campus is already accepting applications for a “beta” class of computer science for engineering students who will meet in a temporary location in Chelsea.

The post PHOTOS: Cornell releases new renderings of applied sciences campus appeared first on Metro.us.

Some 29,000 teachers and support staff in the nation’s third-largest school district were involved, leaving parents of 350,000 students between kindergarten and high school age to find alternative supervision.

Churches, community centers, some schools and other public facilities prepared early on Monday for thousands of children under a $25 million strike “contingency plan” financed by the school district. The children will be supervised half a day and receive breakfast and lunch, allowing some parents to work.

“What are these families going to do? Are you going to stay home from work today because of this?” U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said on CNN. “What is going to happen to your son or daughter?”

“Both sides need to get back to the table as quickly as possible and really stay there and negotiate through the night if necessary. Get it over with quickly so we can get these kids back in school,” Durbin said.

The union has called the plan to care for children during the strike a “train wreck.” It warned that caregivers for the children do not have proper training, and there are fears of an increase in gang-related violence in some high-crime areas.

The school district’s charter schools will be open on Monday, meaning about 50,000 public school students will be in classes as scheduled.

About 20 teachers picketed in front of Overton Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side, wearing red T-shirts, carrying strike signs and singing “We’re not going to take it,” the chorus from the heavy metal band Twisted Sister’s popular anthem.

Several passing cars honked in support, prompting loud cheers from the striking teachers.

Emanuel, the tough talking former White House chief of staff for Obama, blamed the union for the strike and said the two sides had been close to agreement.

“The kids of Chicago belong in the classroom,” Emanuel said at a late Sunday night news conference after talks broke down.

Chicago offered teachers raises of 3 percent this year and another 2 percent annually for the following three years, amounting to an average raise of 16 percent over the duration of the proposed contract, School Board President David Vitale said.

“This is not a small contribution we’re making at a time when our financial situation is very challenging,” he said.

SCHOOLS BUDGET DEFICIT

The school district, like many cities and states across the country, is facing a financial crisis with a projected budget deficit of $3 billion over the next three years and a crushing burden of pensions promised to retiring teachers.

Emanuel said two main issues remain to be resolved: his proposal that teachers be evaluated based in part on student performance on standardized tests, and more authority for school principals.

But union President Karen Lewis, who has sharply criticized Emanuel, said standardized tests do not take into account the poverty in inner city Chicago as well as hunger and violence in the streets.

More than 80 percent of Chicago students qualify for free lunches because they come from low-income households, and Chicago students have performed poorly compared with national averages on most reading, math and science tests.

Union officials said more than a quarter of Chicago public school teachers could lose their jobs if they are evaluated based on the tests.

“Evaluate us on what we do, not the lives of our children we do not control,” Lewis said in announcing the strike.

Vitale said the two sides were scheduled to meet again on Monday morning. He said the two sides were not far apart on compensation issues but were not as close on others, such as evaluations.

Emanuel is among a number of big city U.S. mayors who have championed such school reforms and Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan has endorsed them.

The outcome of the strike could have national implications for school reform.

The Chicago confrontation also threatens to sour relations between Obama’s Democratic Party and labor unions before the presidential election on November 6.

While Obama is expected to win the vote in Chicago and his home state of Illinois, union anger could spill over into neighboring Midwestern states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, where the election with Republican challenger Mitt Romney is much closer.

The post School’s out in Chicago as teachers strike, parents scramble appeared first on Metro.us.

Two months after a bottle-throwing brawl erupted between their entourages at a New York nightclub, Chris Brown and Drake find themselves slapped with a $16 million lawsuit for being responsible for the fracas, according to the New York Daily News. A lawyer for Entertainment Enterprises Ltd., which has ties to the club, says the two R&B stars are ultimately responsible for their followers’ behavior. “It’s their posse, and they’re in charge, and to the extent that they could have controlled or dissipated whatever was going on, we don’t believe they did,” he tells the newspaper.

It turns out Justin Theroux hedged his bets when proposing to Jennifer Aniston by doing it on his birthday, according to People magazine. “He’s been dying to do it,” a friend of the actor and screenwriter says. “His friends knew it was coming.” The moment came while the pair was enjoying a day in New York City, and after Aniston’s heartfelt “yes,” they reportedly rushed to share the news with their families and close friends. “Everyone is really excited for them,” the source says. “It’s amazing to see how happy Justin makes Jen, and everyone was always hoping that he would propose.”

Fans are speculating which ex-boyfriend Taylor Swift wrote her new single, “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” about, but at least one is taking himself out of the running. “I can tell you it’s not about me,” Joe Jonas, who dated Swift in 2008, says during an interview with Washington, D.C. area radio station 94.7 Fresh FM. “I can say it’s not about me because I don’t think we ever tried another time.”

Former “Blossom” star Mayim Bialik was hospitalized after being involved in a traffic collision with a car full of Chilean tourists in Hollywood Wednesday, according to TMZ. Eyewitnesses say that after the “extremely loud” collision, Bialik was “crying really hard” and there was “blood everywhere.” The actress’ hand was reportedly wrapped in a towel in an effort to stabilize a wound to her finger. “Her finger was almost completely severed,” a source says. “It was just hanging there.” Bialik was rushed to a nearby hospital, where the finger was able to be saved. Later that afternoon, she tweeted that she “will keep all my fingers.”

The post Thursday gossip roundup: TomKat will reunite for Suri’s first day of school appeared first on Metro.us.

Because every school uses different caterers, change is on a case-by-case basis. “Parents should research the caterers,” Wu advises. “After parents complained, one provider in Chicago started using more local produce and antibiotic-free chicken. That’s a huge step. Also, take a look at what’s in the school vending machines.”

Packed lunches are an alternate option, but Wu has found that parents can be uneducated on what’s healthy and what’s not. “Parents have to educate themselves and read labels meticulously,” she adds.

Good nutrition sense, however, starts at home in the kitchen. Wu advises parents to involve their children with cooking. “Don’t be afraid to make a mess,” she says. “Show children how easy and fun it is to cook. It’s so helpful for their development of good eating habits.”

How Sarah Wu got started

In 2009, Wu — who has since won praise from Jamie Oliver and other healthy food activists — ate school lunch every day for a year and blogged about it under the pen name Mrs. Q. “I was amazed at how processed it was,” she says about the initial lunch that set her journey in motion. Processed food has little natural nutrition. “It was so unsatisfying. I felt hungry soon after.”

The post How you can help your kids get a healthier school lunch appeared first on Metro.us.

 Call me crazy, but there’s something so satisfying about sitting down after the kids are in bed with a glass of wine, the laptop and all the time in the world to obsess over jacket labels, multi-colored pocket folders, sneakers and personalized backpacks. I don’t feel one bit guilty about it, because it isn’t for me, and I’m not buying anything I wasn’t urged to by their teachers and school
administrators.  Well, they didn’t actually tell me to get them monogrammed dinosaur and camouflage backpacks with matching lunch boxes, water bottles and food containers…but they have to put their supplies and snacks in something, right??  They do need new jackets, but why stop at a serviceable parka?  Isn’t it so much more fun to get adorable little band jackets and pea coats with skulls on them?  And matching hats?  Wait, will they actually wear those without me stapling them to their heads? Time for a refill.

When I was a kid, online shopping didn’t exist, and I was dragged around by my mother to store after store in search of the perfect sandal.  No longer; the perfect sandal is now at most two clicks away and can be done without editorializing and whining from the minors in question. I know what my kids like and what I’m willing to indulge them in, so it’s pretty much a fantastic shopping experience.  With all that time saved, I thought it would be a fun family exercise to make labels for my 3rd grader’s composition notebooks.  Industrious mama made a label document, typed his name and suggested he choose a cool font.  Silly me.  I swapped the shopping headache for hours of changing this typeface to that one, increasing and decreasing the size, and he’s still not sure.  How many days ‘til September 8th?

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