Polybloggimous

There's A Meme Going Around. Of Course I Had To Join In.

2012-02-10T22:27:00.001-05:00

Just to be clear, I only created the Location Manager version. I saw the other two on FB.

Adolf's Soft Side

2012-02-10T08:52:00.000-05:00

Kindly click for proper biggification.

O.K. I'll Care For A Minute.

2012-02-07T23:33:00.001-05:00

I'm not much of a football fan. Scratch that. I'm not any kind of a football fan. I just didn't inherit that gene.

As I'm sure you all know, the Giants won the Super Bowl which means New Yorkers are...uh...a little excited. Before the game, I was wondering if New Yorkers would be more insufferable if the team won or lost. (I kid, I kid). Anyway, today the city threw the team a ticker tape parade. Not only did lower Manhattan come to a standstill for the parade, it was carried live by every local station.

Note: I have personally always thought that one of the lamest things in existence is a parade on television. Parades are things to go to. It's just kind of pointless as a TV show.

Having said all that, I now find myself a huge fan of Steve Weatherford, the Giants' punter. He wasn't satisfied riding on a float in the parade, so he donned his helmet (autographed by a bunch of his teammates), borrowed a drum from a kid and joined a marching band for the length of the parade.

I love this guy!

Do You Think It Was Something I Said?

2012-02-06T16:21:00.002-05:00

I got home today to find an intriguing piece of mail. From India, no less!

Being a child of the 60's, my first thought upon seeing the "Sea Mail" imprint was...Hmmm, fan mail from some flounder?

A look at the return address didn't immediately shed any light on who might have sent me what.

So, of course I opened it and found a little booklet. In Russian! Curiouser and curiouser.

I won't mind a bit of translation from any of my Russian speaking readers*, but a quick internet search for GLS in Mumbai reveals that it's the Gospel Literature Service. Ergo, somebody's trying to save my soul. Why I'm getting anything printed in Russian from an Indian company founded by British Colonists is mighty perplexing. Why they might think I'm a bound-for-hell heathen...a bit less so.

Ah well. Getting mail is always nice.

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Shocking, ain't it? I can think of at least three people who stop by here who will be able to provide translations. Woohoo!

For Whom: The Bell Tolls.

2012-02-03T19:04:00.000-05:00

At least, I hope it does. "Who" vs. "Whom" (or is it "Whom" vs. "Who"), is one of those great bugaboos constantly plaguing grammarians among us. Well, I, for one, don't think it's worth the trouble.

Let's look at a few others on the list first. Some only come up as problems in writing. You're/your, their/there/they're, it's/its, who's/whose...these, you can't get into trouble when you're speaking. They're homophones! If you're writing, frankly, the rules are really simple but I'll admit my brain goes into vapor-lock sometimes and I have to look them up again - at least the latter ones on the list.

I look up desert/dessert regularly when writing but unless you hear with some sort of weird dialect, you'll never confuse the two by the way I pronounce them.

There are a ton more of them on the list, and I don't really have a problem with trying to get people to use the right ones in the right places.

But whom? Fuck whom! I mean, c'mon...it's useless. It's archaic. Dump the bastard!

I know some of you are going to go ahead and trot out the important distinction between the two, but I don't give a shit. I can't, off the top of my head, tell you when "whom" should be used and I REFUSE TO LOOK IT UP! Because I don't care!

You know when I'll use "whom"? When I'm writing dialog for some guy who is supposed to be speaking in a time period before we got smart and dumped "whom"! The story will also include a pantsload of "Thees" and "Thous" and a couple of "Thines" for good measure.

I'M NOT AMISH! We don't need no stinkin' "Whoms"!

You want to know the other time "whom" comes in handy? When some asshole is trying to sound smart and comes off sounding dumb because they use it wrong. And use it so wrong(ly) that even I notice.

Forsooth, methinks I'd lief jetison "whom", and eftsoons be pleased no longer to swink away trying to decipher this particular hugger-mugger. And if I've used any of the archaic words in the previous sentence in error, and you feel the need to rub my nose in it, well...fuck youm too.
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I shall now return to being adorable and congenial. Thank you for your patience.

You Win Some. You Lose Some. But Who's Keeping Score?

2012-02-02T13:50:00.000-05:00

Yesterday should have been a draw. Having received a beauteous new red Yak yarn scarf (points for Anon GF for the making and the giving), I proceeded to wear it in the stifling heat (points por moi). And, I'll grant that the making and the giving of the scarf is actually worth more points than the mere wearing thereof...but that's why I'm describing a mild warm snap into a deathly heat wave.

Anyway, after dinner, I put out some cut up fruit and a couple of slices of banana bread (homemade BY ME), for us to nibble on while watching TV. Now it's not like I put the stuff down and proceeded to snarf it down in two seconds without Anon GF being able to get at it. It's not like I body-checked her when she reached for a bite. No! I just nibbled away at a relaxed pace. Until it was all gone.

Is it my fault she chose to be on the phone the entire time I was nibbling? Hmmmmmm? I think not.

So imagine my surprise 45 minutes later when she said, "What happened to dessert"? And imagine my chagrin as I answered "It got et". (I didn't really believe she might think the cats had eaten a bunch of melon and grapes, but it was worth a shot.)

I'm pretty sure I finished yesterday down a point.

Mmmmmmmmm. Sweet, tasty points!

Stupid Weather Is Stupid.

2012-02-01T16:42:00.000-05:00

So here we are on Fauxgust 1, 2012 and it's 63 freakin' degrees here in Brooklyn. Which would normally be considered a really good thing. But there's just one problem. Y'see...Anon GF just finished making me this lovely red scarf made from the finest Yak yarn money can buy!

Allow me to digress for a moment. Newt Gingrich should be totally in favor of the Yak yarn industry since, I'm told, the yarn only comes from the belly hair on the Yaks. I don't know why that is, but it's what I'm told. Anyway, the perfect harvesters of Yak belly hair are, of course, dexterous little 5-year-olds. Can't ya just see the little urchins patiently brushing Yak bellies until they've harvested only the finest hair. And then getting just a wee bit stomped when the Yak gets bored and walks off. Ah well...plenty more 5-year-olds were that one came from.

Anyway, it's not really scarf weather today, but when one has a brandy new red Yak yarn scarf, lovingly knitted by one's loving Anon GF, (anon to you -- I know who she is), one wears their brandy new red Yak yarn scarf...weather be damned.

Ain't that a purdy scarf?

Edited to add: GF thought you'd like to see some Yaks!

Senator Shortey Responds.

2012-01-26T17:22:00.000-05:00

If you're a regular reader of Standing On The Shoulders Of Giant Midgets, (and if you aren't, shame on you), you'll have read today's shocking entry in which Eric was able to get his hands on an angry letter to Oklahoma State Senator, Ralph Shortey. The letter takes issue with a bill Sen. Shortey has introduced that would ban the use of fetal tissue in the manufacture of food products.

Lest you only see the angry letter (obviously posted because of Eric's unreasonable bias), I have delved deep and managed to acquire Senator Shortey's response to Mr. Schemerofsky Brigman-Johannson. In the interest of fairness, I present it here.

From the desk of

The Honorable Senator

Ralph (Don't Call Me) Shortey

Harold Schermerofsky Brigman-Johannson

President

Happy Sunshine Baby Foods, Incorporated

3457 Placenta Way

Storage Room R-28

Foundling City, OK 74666-6666

Dear Mr. Schermerofsky Brigman-Johannson,

Thank you for taking the time to write regarding pending legislation. The opinions of our constituents are vital in our efforts to make a better Oklahoma for Oklahomans in Oklahoma and elsewhere. You have my sincerest apologies for negatively impacting your disgusting, evil, Satanic business plan. Rest assured, your place in Hell is secure.

As to your difficulties with disposing of the "10,000 gallon tank of fetuses behind Building G", I recommend you contact someone in your local municipal government. I happen to know that your town dump only accepts "one pick-up truck load" per week from each property.

I must admit that I never imagined a business such as yours when I thought of the bill which I've previously said was inspired by my own internet research. At the time, I thought that stories of Embryonic Cell Research in the Food Industry were only apocryphal, but imagine my revulsion when I found that these experiments are not only real, but already producing horrific results. Here are a few examples of my discoveries.

Here, we see Dr. Agnes Mittendorfer-Klein proudly display a "carrot baby".

A hideous "tomato-human" amalgam gone horribly wrong.

This one was called "Peter in a Pepper". Imagine, sir, relegated to a life sealed inside of a vegetable, only to be disposed of as the "ucky part" when the pepper is consumed. I shudder to think of the poor beings entrapped within peppers higher on the Scoville Scale.

Then there are the food products forced to work for their keep -- programmed to commit suicide for our benefit.

And last, but not least, if you won't think of the poor babies, you should have a care for your own future. "Science" has a way of turning on the "scientist".

In closing, just let me say...We know we belong to the land. And the land we belong to is grand. And when we say, "Yeeeow Ayipeoeeay", we're only sayin', you're doing fine Oklahoma. Oklahoma, O.K.

Think about it.

Sincerely,

Ralph Shortey
Oklahoma State Senate.

It Would Have Made Perfect Sense If It Had Made Any Sense, But That's Moot Now Anyhow.

2012-01-26T11:33:00.000-05:00

Hey kids! Remember when Newt went all Hulk at the GOP debate because it was so despicable to ask him to respond to one of his ex-wives' allegations about him asking for an open marriage? Regardless of how despicable the question was, he had a prepared answer.

"Let me be quite clear. Let me be quite clear. The story is false. Every personal friend I have who knew us in that period said the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They weren't interested because they would like to attack any Republican."

I have to admit this didn't make any sense to me at all. Was he claiming that he had a bunch of personal friends in attendance at all times? Did he and his wife have no privacy? In which case, they were already having something of an open marriage to begin with? It's kinda like if he claimed he was all alone in the tundra and he killed a bear with his bare hands and ate it raw to survive and then he scaled a glacier and walked 800 miles all alone back to civilization "and I have the video footage and interviews with my three cameramen and my bear wrangler to prove it!"

Well it turns out I can stop trying to wrap my mind around how Newt had a completely traditional marriage where the couple has moments to themselves and conversations that aren't meant for anyone else, and a bunch of personal friends who could attest that no such conversation ever took place -- because they were there at all times when Newt was reassuring his wife that...oh, never mind. I can stop wondering because apparently, Newt's personal friends were actually his daughters from his first marriage.

So, Newt's daughters from his first marriage were an audience to every private moment Newt had with his wife in his second marriage? Yeah. That's better

Dear Madonna, If I Didn't Care, Would I Bother Writing?

2012-01-17T11:56:00.000-05:00

Well, truthfully, yes. I would. The blog has been light on content lately and I'll take any inspiration I can find.

I realize that David Furnish and (presumably), Elton John are a bit miffed over your Golden Globes win for Best Original Song...and that's delicious in it's own way. I loved the reaction shots of Elton in the audience who was clearly thinking "Your little career fits into a tiny corner of my career and I don't have to pretend I give a rat's ass about you and I was born with this accent, you poseur twit, you!"

But that's neither here nor there and could just be chalked up to professional jealousy.

I'm also getting a kick out of the YOUR digs that Lady Gaga is totally derivative of YOU. And, yes... I'll cop to the fact that when I first heard Born This Way, I thought it sounded more than a bit like you. But then again, when I first saw YOU all those years ago, I thought YOU were Cindi Lauper with a makeover. I don't really have a dog in this fight either, but if Gaga's derivativeness is so egregious, there are courts for that kinda thing. Maybe The Chiffons' lawyer is still practicing.

This is also not the reason we're having this little chat. Sure, I'll admit it; if I'm in the car...alone...I don't automatically change radio stations just because some of your stuff comes on, but I feel pretty much the same way about Gaga. But I can't imagine paying money to listen to either of you. Sorry. I'm probably not either of your intended audiences anyway.

I don't even particularly care about how weird your arms look. It's no skin off my nose who you emulate. Even if I do think you could choose a more universally beloved archetype than Jane Fonda. (I don't have any particularly strong feelings about her either way but you have to admit she comes with a bit of baggage.)

No, I'd like to chat with you a bit about your little acceptance speech. (I'm sorry Madge...you'll have to skip to about 1:30 into this clip to get to the part that's about YOU.)

I've discussed this theme before, but I'm just curious, Madge. Did you meet any of the other people involved in making W.E.? By definition, acceptance speeches are usually filled to brimming with use of the First Person. I want to thank the writers and the make-up artists. I want to thank the HFPA and God. I want to thank the the amazing, talented, irreplaceable Location Manager without whom I would not be standing here today. (Hey, I can dream.)

What I can't remember is ever hearing an acceptance speech so filled with First Person Possessives. You started off basically O.K. You thanked "MY co-writers", (presumably that couple behind you that looked like bodyguards), "MY co-producer", and "MY manager". I'm not sure how else you'd phrase those, so you get a pass.

Then, you went on to mention (in order):
"MY movie"
"MY record"
"MY beautiful leading lady" (will she ever be allowed to work for anyone else?)
"MY film"
and
"MY film"

Frankly, this is a tad Madonna-centric. It's a bit off-putting to those of us who are not Madonna. It's vicariously a bit dismissive to the hundreds of other people who left their fingerprints all over YOUR film. I hesitate to chastise you, Madonna, but it's a bit rude.

I know directors have a reputation for being a little "me, me, me" all the time, but it's really more the exception to the rule. In my experience, the word MY is more often heard in the context of "Oh, damn. I think I left MY script with all MY notes in MY hotel room. Any chance we could send someone back to get it?" And while we're on the subject of just whose movie it is, yes, it's become common for the opening titles to call a movie "X" director's film. But when the Academy Awards come out (you know...the real ones), and they're giving out the Best Picture award, AMPAS considers it the producer's movie.

And while we're on that subject, you sounded like you had won for Best Picture...not for Best Friggin' Original Song! It's a stupid fucking category. We're not talking about the music that accompanies the film and contributes to how an audience reacts from moment to moment. We're talking about the damn song that usually plays over the credits. While most of the audience is leaving. The song that rarely has anything to do with the movie whatsoever! The song that rarely, if ever, even makes a nod toward the period in which the movie takes place. The song that qualifies as successful and relevant if the least it does is to NOT jar the audience out of the moment. Let's have a little perspective here, shall we?

One last thing, Madonna. I feel fairly safe stating that there were millions and millions of people watching who had the same first reaction as me: "Madonna made a movie? Who knew?"

Far be it from me to try to remake your image, but I'd like to suggest some reading material.

a couPle oF thIngs that hAVe NoTHing tO DO wiTH EACh otHer. sO, of cOURse, i'LL mAsh tHEm toGEther IN oNE posT withOUt aNy aTTemPt at coNNEcting THEM*.

2012-01-13T15:13:00.000-05:00

The first thing that has nothing to do with nothing else:

Recently, I've finished a couple of different books that kinda, sorta go together because technology features prominently in each of them. First, there's Turn of the Century, by Kurt Anderson. I'm not sure if it says more about my age or about me personally, but I had to take a quick look before buying it to make sure I knew which century it'd be about. After all, for most of my adult life, the phrase "turn of the century" referred to the end of the 19th century.

This one takes place as the 20th Century is coming to a close and the background of most of it is the wide range of new technologies available and how they feature in new media and in people's daily lives. I'll admit that the book took a while to hook me in, but eventually, I really enjoyed it. One of the more captivating aspects was me trying to remember which technologies were actually new in 1999 when the book was published and which the author was taking liberties with. The fact that some of them seem so antiquated already (dial up anybody?) provided another nice wrinkle.

Technology aside, there's a somewhat Kafkaesque story in there -- one in which basically innocent actions come back to haunt the protagonists later in the story.

The other book I just finished is REAMDE, by Neal Stephenson.

I'm a big fan of Stephenson's and, overall, I recommend this. I'll cut to the chase right away and say that even though I think this may be Stephenson's weakest book, it's still so head and shoulders above most other books I read that it still rates as terrific. (Note: I really like long books so, at 1044 pages, this one was right in my wheelhouse, but it could still stand to lose about 300 pages in the middle without suffering. Sorry...just my opinion. I have a feeling Stephenson may be a victim of his own success and reputation, making editors hesitant to force that type of issue.)

Anyway, this one centers on a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game called T'Rain and the people who created it. Part of the company's plan involves the realization that some players will naturally find ways to monetize the game and profit from it -- so they embrace that model and build that into the design. Unfortunately, one group of hackers creates a virus called REAMDE to make the profit-making quicker and more...profitable.

Unwittingly, this sets off a series of kidnappings, murders, terrorist episodes and epic battles...both in the real world and within the world of T'Rain. The protagonists will include IT geeks, hackers, MI6, FBI, local cops, sex tourists, survivalists and a cast of hired thugs.

Sound confusing? Nah.

" [the] decryption key [was] pulled out of a dead man's wallet by a Hungarian in the Philippines communicating with an American in Canada, the conversation taking place on an imaginary planet."

See? Not confusing at all. But it's really well worth it. Really.

Something that has nothing to do with nothing:

Today is the 30th anniversary of the Air Florida Flight 90's crash into the Potomac River shortly after takeoff. Watch the linked video and read some of the other coverage. In addition to being highly newsworthy, this crash is sort of a seminal moment in the history of news coverage. Because of where and when it took place, much of the event was carried live to most of the country and I honestly can't remember a prior event that was covered with this sense of immediacy and access.

Ten days from now, it will be the 30th anniversary of World Airways' Flight 30's crash. This was a flight from Newark, NJ to Boston's Logan Airport during a snow storm and the plane slid off the runway when it landed and ended up partially in Boston Harbor. The front portion of the plane broke off including the front row of passenger seats. The only two deaths in this crash were passengers in the front row whose bodies were never recovered. (I'm not ascribing any weird conspiracy theories, but I'm amazed that the bodies - strapped into their seats -- were never found. Maybe they were eventually and I'm just not aware of it. Please correct me if my info is wrong.)

Anyway, the reason this one sticks in my mind is that I was a student at Emerson College at the time and it turns out I knew two people on the flight. One of them was a college friend and I honestly have no memory of knowing she was on the flight at the time it happened. I know we discussed it a few years later, but I'm amazed that I didn't know about this when she was part of my immediate circle of friends. I'm at a loss to explain that. (BTW, this person is a current FB friend but I don't think she's ever visited the blog. If she does happen to read this and feel like commenting, I'd welcome her memories.)

The second person I knew, I didn't actually meet until 4 years later. It turns out that he was in the second row of seats and basically watched the rest of the plane continue further into the harbor without him. If you read any of the reports about the crash, one of the themes is that Logan Airport's response to the crash had some real problems. My friend recounted how he had waded ashore from the wreckage and somehow ended up wearing a jacket that had fallen on him from the overhead bin. Once on the shore, he wandered around the tarmac for a while before he was picked up by an open stake-bed truck that ended up ferrying passengers to the airport fire station (which was an unheated garage space). One of the things that stuck with him was that when he climbed onto the truck, he ended up sitting next to one of the pilots -- who promptly said, "That's my jacket. Give it back."

As is customary here, I have no unifying point to this story...just an odd memory I felt like writing down.

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*i reCEived thE foLLoWing eMail just a SHORT time ago, so I've altered my headLINE. iS this aCCeptable?

Today's Petty Annoyance.

2012-01-10T10:55:00.000-05:00

You may (or may not) have noticed that posting has been a little sparse around here lately. Depending on your attitude about that, I either apologize profusely, or graciously accept your gratitude. And, honestly, I'm not really sure why I haven't been putting up new stuff. Could it be that less stuff is annoying me lately? (I sincerely doubt that.) Could it be that I think it's unlikely you'll give a crap about what's annoying me? (Heaven forfend; that'd be unpossible!)

No, I think I've just been lazy.

Anyway, last night Channel 4 ran a story about a Traffic Agent who got arrested because she tried to prevent the City Marshall from towing her car because of unpaid tickets. (Here's the NY Times version.) This story rates as ironic or amusing or enraging, since Traffic Agents are the folks who, among other things, run around writing tickets. These folks are classified as "civilians employees" but they wear a version of the NYPD uniform so people will take them seriously. They're don't get to carry guns...Thank Gawd. (Every few years, one of them gets into a fight with an irked citizen and then there are a few months worth of them lobbying to be armed and then the city issues a resounding "No", followed by a statement from the Police Commissioner suggesting they try to do their job without being complete assholes about it.)

This is all neither here nor there.

What peeves me is that, Channel 4 seems unable to pinpoint where (other than Brooklyn), the story occurred. Brooklyn, like the rest of NY, is made up of a bunch of neighborhoods. Let's start with a look at the photo and caption Channel 4 used on their website.

I've highlighted where they say it happened on Greene Avenue in Flatbush. Now, let's go to the map!

That blue line running East-West near the top of the map is approximately where Greene Ave is. Then, please note that little pinkish, orange shape near the bottom of the map -- Flatbush. Not even close!

But it got worse. They don't have video of the story up, but they kept cutting to interviews with folks about the story (because obviously it's critical that we discover whether or not this might be annoying to the average citizen - average citizens were predictably annoyed), and they kept running little graphics at the bottom identifying the neighborhood variably as Downtown Brooklyn, Fort Greene, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Two of those are possible while one...is not. But regardless, I'm pretty sure that since this took place at the location of a parked car, the event didn't travel from neighborhood to neighborhood. And even if they're unsure of the exact border of a neighborhood, it's not like Ft. Greene and Bed-Stuy overlap each other -- there's an entire other neighborhood separating the two from each other.

Granted, this probably doesn't concern anyone who doesn't actually live in Brooklyn, but I kinda expect a local news station to be able to correctly identify local neighborhoods...even if they aren't in Manhattan. It's a little like the Network News talking about a story in Paris and showing you video of Cairo. Somebody's likely to notice.

P.S. If you don't, in fact, give a crap about what's annoying me, feel free to tell me what's annoying you today. I won't even tell you I don't give a crap about it.

Oh, The Shame!

2012-01-09T15:44:00.000-05:00

Anon Niece has another kid on the way, so Anon GF has been knitting lots of teeny, tiny things to clothe the child and inspire oooohs and ahhhhhs and awwwwwwwws. (At least for the month or so stuff fits kids at that age.)

Anyway, while looking through patterns Anon GF announced, "Hey, here's one with a Star Trek insignia on it. I should make that". Which I said would be a brilliant idea, but she shouldn't make it red. Then I had to explain why.

Apparently, these things aren't learned by osmosis and I've clearly been falling down on the job. I'm so ashamed. (It's not like I expect random Plan 9 From Outer Space references!)

And So, It Begins...

2012-01-03T14:27:00.000-05:00

I don't have anything in particular I want to talk about today. They're having the GOP Primary in Iowa today (I think?) and I'm pretty sure whoever wins scares me about as much as the other possibilities, so it's a wash regardless.

There was a story on the news a few nights ago about a "promising new treatment for acid reflux", so I decided to pay attention to that. Most of the story was about how much having acid reflux sucks, (yeah, big news there), and concluded with about 5 seconds describing some kind of surgery where you get an artificial lining installed in your esophagus. Oh, goody. Surgery that isn't available that I wouldn't have anyway.

Last night's "Everybody Panic" story was about how some unidentified group (at least unidentified by the anchorman), in some Scandinavian country found a higher incidence of prostate cancer among men who drank milk regularly as children! Holy Crap! I drank milk as a child. The story concluded, (of course), with a disclaimer that the test group was really small and from a tiny geographic area and that the results were all anecdotal and the research was far from establishing any cause and effect, so you should basically ignore the whole thing.

Here's an entire story about some guy who realized that constantly interacting with his iPhone may get in the way of him experiencing his real life. Thank Gawd the NY Times was there to reveal this hidden truth. PIX OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN!

Since none of this is particularly inspiring, let's begin the New Year with CATS!

Widget and Teufel. The Teufman can't stand sleeping alone.

And Widget is more comfortable crawling into a nightshirt. We're trying to teach her not to turn it inside out, but we're not holding out any hope for her properly identifying which hole her neck goes through. LuLu's just embarrassed by he whole thing.

All The Smart People Are Saying...

2011-12-26T12:21:00.000-05:00

This has been bothering me since yesterday.* As is our wont on Sunday mornings, we watched McLaughlin Group and he was doing his annual year-end Awards Show where they all vote for things like "Best Political Comeback", "Lamest Apology", etc. I don't remember what the specific topic of this one was, but McLaughlin had asked each guest to predict the outcome of something or other -- it may have been about Libya, but it doesn't matter.

Anyway, one of them prefaced his prediction by asserting, "All the smart people are saying...".

Here's the part that's got me bothered. Does he mean the people who are saying "X" are saying it because they're smart or are they smart because that's what they're saying (i.e. agreeing with him)?

It strikes me as a wonderful phrase because it allows the person who hears it to interpret the information anyway s/he chooses to interpret it. How wonderfully meaningless!

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*"bothering", as in "causing me to think about it bemusedly a couple of times", not as in, "the bastard who said this has ruined my life".

Have A Merry, Happy, Joyous, Festive, Jocund, and Jolly HoliYadaYadaYada.

2011-12-25T11:28:00.001-05:00

Hope you're all having a wonderful day(s)! I just thought I'd show you what I think may be the best tree I've seen this year in New York. It's about 6" tall and it's on the counter at the coffee "lab" around the corner from my house.

Three things:

1. I wish Rockerfeller Center would try to duplicate this next year. I think an 80' version of this would be cool beans.

2. I have no idea what's up with the broken Channukah* candles in the background. A friend suggested it might be some sort of Channukah gang signal.

3. If you want more trees to look at, Steve has links to a bunch of 'em.

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*You'd think there'd be one spelling of the word Channukah that doesn't offend spell check. You'd be wrong.

The Trump GOP Smackdown Has Been Cancelled And The World Is A Poorer Place For It.

2011-12-22T12:04:00.000-05:00

I guess I missed it when The Donald pulled out of moderating a debate between the GOP candidates, and I'm pissed. I don't know about you people, but I was really looking forward to it. I've only watched highlights of the other debates but I assure you I intended to be glued to screen for this one. It would have been just like a spectacular blending of McLaughlin Group with Toddlers & Tiaras.

Personally, I refuse to accept that this glorious event will never take place. In my tradition of pounding square pegs into round holes...I bring you news of the debate from an alternate (and much more entertaining) universe.

Image is embiggable.

Text of article:

After much hand-wringing over who would participate, last night Donald Trump "moderated" a debate between GOP hopefuls Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum. In the interest of "fairness", Trump also tapped Gary Busey to stand in for Ron Paul and Rosie O'Donnell for John Huntsman, both of whom had declined the invitation. Trump declared that they were both "terrific, terrific proxies since Gary is actually a bit saner than Paul and really, how many votes could Rosie lose for Huntsman? A loser is a loser." Also appearing, in spite of having suspended his campaign, was Herman Cain who said he "just wanted another shot at Michelle Bachmann. Ooooooweeeee! She's a nine-nine-nine!"

The evening got off to a contentious start when Trump introduced Rick Santorum as "Rick from Pennsylvania". When Santorum objected, Trump expressed his disgust that a Presidential Contender would have the temerity to adopt such a foul word as his last name and that he refused to use such language in a family setting. "Have you Googled that word? You should be ashamed of yourself", he chastised the candidate.

That this would be an unusual debate was telegraphed from the setting; the debate took place in the Boardroom viewers have become accustomed to seeing on Trump's highly rated reality series. To further the theme, Trump was flanked by Donald, Jr. and Ivanka. Their actual participation was limited to Donald, Jr. asking his father for hairstyling advice.

The format began with a fairly traditional series of questions for the candidates, but the director's choice of camera angles was oddly jarring. Later, it was discovered that Trump had fired the director during the first five minutes of the telecast because the director had attempted to correct Trump when he claimed that this was the "first and only debate". He then directed that the camera be kept on him except for brief cutaways to anyone he addressed by name. An insider says that Trump insisted America would be best served by seeing his reactions to the candidates' responses.

Newt Gingrich, who recently asserted that anyone concerned with Gay Rights should "vote for Obama", expanded on that theme by reeling off a long list of other people who should do the same. The list included anyone opposed to sweatshops ("we're outsourcing good American jobs"), child labor ("ditto"), or the folding of the Judicial Branch into the Executive.

When Mitt Romney was asked about recent reports of wireless companies tracking and recording each keystroke customers make on their mobile devices, he brandished his phone and said, "This is indeed ominous". Before he could continue, Michelle Bachmann angrily interrupted, saying, "Now this is what I've been talking about. The Media keeps accusing me of saying dumb things and here you've got Mitt Romney waving his phone around and calling it 'ominous'. I can see clearly from here that it's a Motorola!"

One of the things that separated this debate from traditional debates was Trumps willingness to insert himself into the proceedings at every opportunity.

At one point, he said to Rick Perry, "Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is very bad"*

He made the observation, "It's always good to be underestimated"* to Ron Paul stand-in Gary Busey.

Rick Santorum was advised, "Part of being a winner is knowing when enough is enough. Sometimes you have to give up the fight and walk away, and move on to something that's more productive."*

After responding to a question about foreign debt and balance of trade, Bachmann was informed, "All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me - consciously or unconsciously. That's to be expected."*

And once when Trump seemed to have become distracted and lost interest in the proceedings, he said, "That's one of the nice things. I mean, part of the beauty of me is that I'm very rich"*

The second hour of the debate consisted of "Candidate Challenges" the most mesmerizing of which may have been the Obama Dartboard Competition. Rosie O'Donnell was ironically closest to the bullseye and leading when Rick Perry's turn came. Pulling a large handgun from his waistband, he obliterated the target but was judged to have lost points when the recoil knocked him on his backside.

Trump closed the evening by saying he would refrain from declaring a winner until the "wonderful, wonderful, exciting Results Show" he'd be hosting immediately after the conclusion of The Super Bowl.

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*These are actual, albeit completely out of context, Donald Trump quotes!

Film Is A Visual Medium. Your Work Will Be Obscured To The Fullest Extent Of Available Technology. Thank You For Playing. (Part Two, Take Two).

2011-12-19T10:29:00.000-05:00

I left you a ~~few days~~ week or so ago, half-way through talking about how each member of the crew on a movie has the heartfelt conviction that their part in making a movie is the mostest importantest, critical, necessary and worthy part in the process. I alluded to the sad fact that most of those people are wrong; how could their contribution be the most important when obviously, my contribution is the one that really matters? (he said self-mockingly).

Let's pick up (again) where we left off; a bit more about instances where the location was clearly the star of the scene but the Director, the D.P., and the Editor didn't get the memo.

There's this really great Dim Sum place in Chinatown Called Nom Wah Tea Parlor. It's on Doyers Street and it's been there, more or less, forever...or at least, since 1920. It sits at the spot where Doyers Street makes a sharp dogleg turn which was once known as The Bloody Angle. (The blind angle offered a wonderful spot for various gangs' "hatchet men" to catch each other unawares. It's said that more people have died violently at this spot than at any other street intersection in America.) Here's a shot looking toward the present day site of Nom Wah from the early 20th Century and another similar shot from a few weeks ago.

The first time I ran across Nom Wah was on my very first job as a Location Manager. It wasn't going to be featured in the video, but, like every other place on the block, I needed to make arrangements to keep their lights on throughout the shoot. This gave me the opportunity to meet Wally Tang, who owned the place from 1974 until a couple of years ago. Here's a shot of Wally from, I think, the early 80's.

Two things came about from this shoot. 1. I met Wally and discovered that he spoke no English at all the first time I met him, then became progressively more fluent as the week went on and I stopped in a few more times, and 2. Nom Wah is one of those locations you get a look at and then decide you're going to get it into a movie if it kills you.

When I worked on True Believer not much later, (see Part One of this bit), Nom Wah wasn't really going to show up any better than it had the first time I saw it. Once again, I just needed Wally to keep his lights on throughout the night. Once again, Wally spoke no English at all on my first visit and became perfectly fluent within a week. He also invited me to have dinner with him and his extended family while the shoot went on in the cold and dark. It was very enjoyable.

Fast forward a bunch of years to when we shot A Good Night To Die.* This is a movie that either should be better than it is or is better than it has a right to be; I've never seen the whole thing, so I can't judge. It did have a cool premise; a bunch of freelance hitpersons all hired to off each other including Deborah Harry as a big boss and Ally Sheedy and Ralph Macchio as a seriously whacked-out brother/sister hit team.**

Anyway, the lead-up to the finale of the movie was supposed to take place in a restaurant. The type of restaurant wasn't specified, but I thought of Nom Wah right away. Here's some more shots (interior and exterior) to give you a better idea what the place has to offer visually.

One thing you'll note is that viewed from certain angles, the restaurant offers some really interesting backgrounds and viewed from certain other angles...not so much. The powers that be chose...not so much. I mean, sure, I accept that the scene is about the people, but you can get a tight shot of people and still line it up so you're seeing the cool counter in the background instead of the friggin heater hanging from the ceiling. Am I right? Here's the scene.

Sorry, but I felt dissed!

That scene cuts short of it, but after Michael Rappaport leaves the restaurant (SPOILER ALERT), he gets shot enough times to make Bonnie & Clyde and Sonny Corleone look positively un-perforated. I could only track down some screenshots from the interior looking out; not any viewed from the exterior if any of those angles made the final cut. I guess I get a little bit of artistic vindication from that part.***

Incidentally, I had lunch there a few weeks ago on the day I shot the more recent of these pictures. The restaurant had been closed for a while, but was re-opened about a year ago by Wilson, Wally's nephew, and he's updated the kitchen but left the dining room and exterior alone. Of course, I approve. (Wilson is behind the counter in the first interior shot above.) As to the food? I have to admit that I'm not a huge fan of dim sum, so my opinion doesn't count for much. If it's any indication, the place was packed by the time I left.
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*The film has a release date of 2003 but it was shot a few years earlier and experienced all sorts of difficulties getting distribution. That's another story entirely and I only know the dirty details third, fourth and fifth hand, so I won't go into it.

** Here's a clip of them with Lainie Kazan. It's important to note that throughout this scene, I was lying on the floor in the back seat so I could relay info from the director and give them directions on where to go. I spent about 4 hours trying not to laugh during takes.

***It's also not necessary to point out that the bullets slamming through Rappaport's body seem to dematerialize just short of hitting the front window. We didn't have the time or budget to replace the front windows for five takes of that scene.

Finally! I'm Ahead of the Curve On Something!

2011-12-15T10:11:00.000-05:00

It's difficult to express my pride at having beat XKCD to the punch on this issue of global import. And yes...I've left in the "I-guess-he-told-me" response from Benny the Grocery Assemblage Engineer. Those of us who are at the leading edge of complaining about the really important stuff need to be prepared to face the consequences when we're asked to display the courage of our convictions.*

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*The flavored-coffee lobby scares the shit out of me, so I tread a little bit more lightly there.

Goy To The Woyld

2011-12-11T18:46:00.001-05:00

So it's that time of year when we all find ourselves deep in the trenches of the War on Christmas and I just thought I'd take a moment to point out a few of the war's unacknowledged heroes. The covert agents serving deep behind enemy lines. The ones living each day in danger of exposure and punishment. But they soldiered on and since many of them have passed on, I think it's high time to give them the recognition they so deserve.

Of course, I'm talking about Jewish songwriters. As I'm sure you're aware, many of the perennially favorite Christmas songs were written by Jews. Irving Berlin, Jerry Herman, Johnny Marks ... the list goes on and on. And the explanation has always been that they were just writing songs for a large demographic and that the songs, if successful, would have a really long shelf-life and continue paying royalties for years to come. And while there's certainly some truth to that, I can now point out that those reasons were just providing cover.

I haven't been made privy to all of their (Ha, I fixed it.) heroic actions in the War on Christmas, but I can now let you in on a little secret; All of those Christmas songs contain subliminal subversive messages. Let's start with the Godfather of covert caroling, the 19th Century French composer Adolphe Adam who wrote "O Holy Night". His rebellion was somewhat arcane and difficult to decipher, but courageous nonetheless. If you follow a complex code, utilizing every third note from every other line of the score (and leaving out the bassoon's part), there's a message that says, "Watch out fellow Jews. Serving in the French military will get your ass tossed in jail." If Alfred Dreyfus hadn't been such a music snob, he might have avoided a great deal of unpleasantness.

Silver Bells, if played backwards contains the message "Shop at Kresge's, Shop at Kresge's" repeated ad infinitum.

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer includes coded references to the locations of discount Chinese delivery and discount movie tickets.

The Christmas Waltz is a bit more bizarre but no less seditious in its intent. The song includes an hidden recipe for potato knishes and knaidlach.

Obviously, discovering these folks' heroism has been difficult; they were double agents serving under the most trying of conditions and their secrets have been well kept. If you're aware of any of them I've missed, please let me know. I, for one, think it's time their heroism was celebrated.

Postus Interruptus: Film Is A Visual Medium. Your Work Will Be Obscured To The Fullest Extent Of Available Technology. Thank You For Playing. (Part Two)

2011-11-30T10:16:00.001-05:00

I left you a few days ago half-way through talking about how each member of the crew on a movie has the heartfelt conviction that their part in making a movie is the mostest importantest, critical, necessary and worthy part in the process. I alluded to the sad fact that most of those people are wrong; how could their contribution be the most important when obviously, my contribution is the one that really matters?*

Let's pick up where we left off; a bit more about instances where the location was clearly the star of the scene but the Director, the D.P., and the Editor didn't get the memo.

Interruption ::insert car screeching to a halt sfx::

So I got this far into writing this post and what happens? My phone rings and it's one of the producers from a job I worked on a couple of weeks ago. And he's calling to say he forgot to thank me for my work; that the footage looks great and the buildings we chose cut perfectly with the interior scenes they shot on the stage.

Who the hell does that? Making people feel all appreciated and shit? Hell, I'm usually satisfied to just get paid in a reasonable amount of time and this guy's got to act like a total mensch? Way to fuck up a perfectly good rant, Jeff.

Note: I've got a long-standing policy of not naming names here and I'm half-way keeping to my own rule, but I don't think I'll upset the apple cart by outing someone for being one of the good guys. In fact, everyone connected with this show is over-the-top, unexpectedly, unnecessarily, stupendously NICE. Yup, same show; same group of people.

If you pay attention (in a couple of months), I'll be pimping a new network series and you'll be able to put two and two together and figure out exactly who I'm talking about. And, not only are the people making the show really terrific to work for; the show's actually really funny. You should watch it. I'll give you a heads up when it starts to air.

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*On a semi-serious note, I remember when Vanilla Sky was released and the BIG thing they all talked about in the publicity was the scene where Tom Cruise finds himself alone in a completely deserted Times Square. It's a spectacular sequence and a jaw dropping bit of imagery. And every time it got talked about it was about how this person or that person (Director, Star, Producer, Film Commissioner, etc.) pulled off a miracle to make it happen. And while I don't doubt that each of those people was directly involved to an unusual degree, it might have been nice if anyone acknowledged that the movie even had a Location Manager. The credits list more than one NY Location Manager and I honestly don't remember who did what on that show, but suffice it to say, pulling that off took an impressively HUGE amount of work for the Locations Dept. Excellent work, guys!

A Brief Non-Commercial Interruption.

2011-11-21T09:32:00.001-05:00

I'll get back to telling you about how the Powers-That-Be are conspiring to conceal my contribution to the art of cinema -- there's not even an Oscar for Bestest Locations -- but first, I wanted to show you some really cool pictures I ran across recently on a friend's FaceBook page.

I met Iris Ng a few years ago when she was the Rigging Gaffer* on a show I was working on. These shots are from another movie she was working on and there was no way to get the camera crane up to a 12th floor roof except to haul it up with a construction crane. One of these shots is the crane on its way up and the other is on its way down. (I'll also give props to the Location Manager, since using the construction crane called for shutting down traffic on 36th Street twice for a few hours each time. Suck it, crosstown traffic!)

Also, as long as I'm snarfing content from Iris' photo album, here are a couple of shots that actually involve her department. This is what happens when you set 44 electricians loose on 13 rooftops!

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* For the typical scene, all of the lighting is done by the electricians on the shooting crew, but for larger scenes there's a separate Rigging Crew brought in hours or days ahead of the shooting crew. The Rigging Gaffer runs the Electric Department on the rigging crew, supervising the roughing in of however many miles of cable and however many lighting instruments will be needed to shoot the scene(s). By definition, there's only a separate rigging crew brought in for scenes that involve larger lighting situations ranging from "Hey, that's a lot of lights" to "Holy Crap, did you leave any equipment for the rest of the shows in town?"

Film Is A Visual Medium. Your Work Will Be Obscured To The Fullest Extent Of Available Technology. Thank You For Playing. (Part One)

2011-11-15T10:42:00.000-05:00

When I was in college, if you were majoring in Film, you had to produce a "Final" film and the crew was made up of fellow students. I remember working on one film where Student "X" was working as the Gaffer...and he was really fast. The problem was that he'd light the scene as soon as he knew where the actors would be acting, but not before he found out where the camera would be. So he always set up the lights in the shot. The third or fourth time this happened, he screamed at the Director of Photography, "The lighting is beautiful! How about if you 'adjust' your shot to avoid the lights for once ‽"

You may find this ludicrous -- and at the time, so did I -- but I'm beginning to sympathize with the poor deluded schmuck. It's true; everyone who works on movies has, at one time or another, felt like their contribution wasn't getting the respect it deserved. (They've also all felt they deserved a really cool leather crew jacket or even a shiny new BMW instead of some crappy T-shirt as a wrap gift, but that's another story altogether.)

It's a good news/bad news situation.

For the filmmaker, it's good that someone is obsessing about what time shows up on that clock at the beginning of every take of Scene 87B. It's good that someone is obsessing about the lead character always wearing that bracelet during the third day of the story, but not on the fourth day of the story. It's good that someone is obsessing about getting a clean recording of that mournful train whistle in the distance. It's good that someone is obsessing over there always being plenty of peanut butter & cheese crackers on hand; even if most of the crew thinks they're disgusting, they keep disappearing at an impressive rate, so they must be making somebody happy.

For the obsessed, though, here's the bad news. No matter how dedicated you are to carrying out the narrow focus of your job description, it's never going to be a movie about a clock that says 9:42 A.M. at just the right moment of screen time; it'll never be a movie about that adorable tennis bracelet; it's never going to be a movie about moody train whistles and if it's ever a movie about peanut butter and cheese crackers, there had better be a fairly engrossing subplot.

So yeah...I get it. the movie is about the people and what they do and say in the locations you pay me to find, but would it be asking too much to actually let the audience get a look at the places sometimes? Huh?

You want an example? On one movie, I was sitting down for a meeting with the Director and the D.P. to discuss the look of the film before I got heavily into scouting. The D.P. said he intended to shoot most of the movie "kinda long-lensey, in your face, really intimate". "Great", I said, "We can shoot the whole movie in your office." (I swear this is an accurate transcript.)

Here's the opening scene of the movie and here's just a screenshot since embedding is disabled.

Go ahead and watch the whole thing; it's a pretty terrific scene. But it's also a pretty terrific location. We looked at 42 BAZILLION restaurants before choosing that one. I'm not sure why we bothered.* Look, I know the scene is about the people around that table, but couldn't we get one stinking in-focus shot of the place? (Why yes...I am being a whiney little bitch.)

One of the first movies I had any real Locations responsibilities on was True Believer. The opening sequence of the movie is a murder in Chinatown that sets up the rest of the plot. Here's the trailer for the movie and you can see a snippet of the Chinatown sequence in the first few seconds.

The scene takes up a couple of minutes of actual screen time and it took two full nights to shoot. It took me two solid weeks to make all of the arrangements necessary to shoot there ... stores/restaurants keeping their lights and signs on all night, access to a bunch of roofs and fire escapes for lighting and camera positions, etc.**

Once again...it's a terrific scene, but Chinatown is really fuzzy and out of focus for most of it. Does a little part of me resent the fact that two weeks of my hard work is barely visible on the screen? Nooooooo! That would be petty and stupidly self-centered of me. (Feh.)

This Post Will Be Continued with more petty, self-centered whining...
Stay Tuned!
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*For the record, that scene was shot at O'Neal's on Grand Street.

And just a bit of trivia...O'Neal's is across the street from the Old Police Headquarters Building. If you go into the basement of O'Neal's, you can still see a small remnant of a tunnel that used to connect it directly to the Police Building so cops could get there clandestinely during Prohibition.

**The director wanted the street to "suggest" that there was some sort of street festival going on and he wanted a bunch of banners strung across the street to add color and texture, so I had to get permission to string those between buildings. Nobody really cared what the banners would say, since most of the audience wouldn't be able to read Chinese, so the Art Department hired some Chinese sign-writer to make them and told him to just make them say innocuous stuff -- "Venerable Honored Ladies' Club Flower Sale" -- stuff like that. The sign writer decided it would be really funny to sell the movie a bunch of banners filled with rabid Communist slogans -- which we discovered when the Art Department started hanging them up and the street was suddenly filled with people screaming at us and threatening all sorts of dire consequences if we didn't pull them down immediately.

Just A Tad of Sutton Place.

2011-11-10T17:14:00.001-05:00

Manhattan's east side has a bunch of bulges in it, so First Avenue isn't always the furthest one to the East. Downtown, there's Avenues A, B, C, and D. Way uptown, around 116th Street, there's Pleasant Avenue between 1st Ave and the East River.

At 57th Street, there's one street east of First Avenue...called Sutton Place. (It becomes York Avenue as you head north and runs up into the low 90's.)

Anyway, Sutton Place was established as a wealthy enclave starting around 1920. If you look it up, you'll find a list of famous people who have lived there. At the end of 57th Street, there's a little park called Sutton Place Park. It's actually cantilevered out over the FDR Drive.

Here's a couple of little items there.

First, before you enter the park, there's a townhouse that is (or was?) owned by the Heinz Estate. (Yeah, the pickle people.) One of my first jobs in NY involved a shot on the street in front of the house and the director wanted it to appear as if the lead actor was coming out of the house. For days, I kept getting stonewalled by a fairly officious housekeeper who kept taking messages, but I'd get no response. Finally, I asked another doorman nearby if he knew any way I could contact someone. He told me that the owner walked her two little yappy dogs every afternoon at the same time.

So I waited for the alloted time (OK, I stalked the owner) and got permission for our actor to stand outside the door for the shot. The lady I spoke to was roughly 135 years old at the time (1986), so I'd imagine she's really cantankerous now. Here's the house. Same blue door as 25 years ago.

The UN Secretary General's Official Residence is next door around the corner. The cop in the booth out front gets really pissy when you take pictures of it, so use your imagination.

The park itself is below grade just outside of the frame if you looked to your right. It's a lovely little park with a great view of the Queensborough Bridge just a few blocks north. (No, I'm never going to start calling it the Ed Koch Bridge, official declarations be damned.) Anyway, the centerpiece of the park is a bronze statue of a wild boar. I don't think there's any special significance to the boar, just that the guy who donated it, liked it.

I'm not sure whether or not the pedestal is a replica of the original, but it's covered with little mice, toads, crabs, snakes and other crawlies. I have no idea what their significance is, and I highly doubt they hang out together like that in nature.

Here's another thing. While trying to find out about this statue, I found a link discussing a life-sized sculpture of an elephant that was donated to the UN for their sculpture garden a few years ago. Apparently it's got a prominent two foot long penis! According to what I could find online, the UN cheerfully accepted the elephant and then promptly landscaped it so that it looks like the elephant is charging from a thicket of bushes -- hiding it's nether regions. I think the sculpture garden is closed for renovations, but I promise to document this wonder for you at the soonest opportunity.

Luna Brooklyn

2011-11-09T19:30:00.001-05:00

Today Is National ________ Day!

2011-11-09T09:08:00.001-05:00

I'll admit I'm a little disappointed. Today seems to be National...uh...nothing Day. On the face of it, I'm sure you find this as disappointing as I do. (Oh, c'mon! How hard is it to humor me?) Here we sit in a wilderness of 5 days commemorating and honoring...nothing at all between Guy Fawkes Night and Armistice Day. Unless you're a devoted nihilist, this doesn't inspire your inner-squee.

You can, however, choose to join me in viewing this as a grand opportunity. November 9th is just champing at the bit for something to celebrate. Think of it! How many times have you found yourself wanting to honor something only to realize, all the good days are already taken! Well, November 9th is up for grabs -- as are November 6th, 7th, 8th and 10th! It's a veritable cornucopia of days just hankering for something to devote themselves to! (to which to devote themselves?)

I have a few suggestions.

-National Head Lice Day (This could be either "pro" or "anti"; I'm flexible).
-National Chopped Liver Day (the good old American - i.e. Jewish -- kind, not that Frenchified pate' stuff.)
-National Bile Appreciation Day. (Face it; you need the stuff. And think how boring the internet would be without people spewing bile and venting their spleens! It's second only to cats in filling the intertoobs!)
-National Jabberwocky Day. (Talking like a pirate has its own day. Is nonsensical stream-of-consciousness any less deserving?)

of possibly my favorite pet issue --

-National Blog Hijack™Day! (I think this one speaks for itself.)

Let's hear your neglected issues deserving of their own commemorative day.

See? The kids are celebrating already!

Art By The Square Yard.

2011-11-08T19:07:00.001-05:00

I was looking for something on my computer today and ran across these shots I took while scouting a show a few years ago. I haven't been back to this street since I shot these, and I heard the buildings might be torn down for redevelopment, so when I'll speak of the place in the present tense even though past tense may be more accurate.

Anyway, these are some shots of 5Pointz, a self-described "Institute of Higher Burnin" in Long Island City (Queens). The shots I've got are only a small fraction of what exists. And regardless of what you may think about graffiti, you've got to admit this is pretty damned awesome. (Comments about wildlife and nature being better will be summarily deleted - Nothing ever tried to bite me in Long Island City.)

Sometimes, I Just Amuse Me.

2011-11-07T11:41:00.000-05:00

If you're unfamiliar with The Villages, this won't make any sense at all.

What If The Phone Never Rings Again?

2011-11-04T12:49:00.000-04:00

Disclaimer: The phone calls that brought on this post confused the hell out of me. So much so that I'm not sure I can tell this in a coherent manner. I'll just sum it up here before I begin: If you read it and find yourself asking, "What the hell was that all about?", I'll have conveyed it perfectly.

If you read blogs by freelancers, you've run across a common theme...paranoia about turning down jobs. Turning down a job...any job...runs counter to pretty much every instinct a freelancer has. No matter how busy you may be, you're never sure your phone will ever ring again. So maybe you get a call and you're already booked for those days. I guarantee you'll try to figure out how to do two jobs at once before you turn them down. Maybe you're working nights and somebody wants you do some scouting during the day. You'll think long and hard about working a week shuttling back and forth between both jobs. I'll sleep when I'm dead is a thought we've all entertained. You end up turning down those jobs but you always wonder if you could have pulled it off if you'd really tried.

There are times when you get a call from someone who doesn't really have enough money. They want you to work for half (or less) of your daily rate; they can't afford for you to hire the help the job will require; they want you to find places that will let them shoot for free. These are a little less difficult to turn down, but you still have your doubts.. Every time you think about that job you turned down, and you will think about it, you'll find yourself wondering if you just turned down the next Spielberg.

Then there are the rare occasions when you get a call that just confuses you. I got one of those yesterday. My phone rang around 4:30 yesterday afternoon to find out if I was available to do some scouting. The caller gave his name and the name of the company he was working for...both of them ringing the vaguest of bells in my steel-trap sieve of a mind. (The company turns out to be a real commercial production company and the caller had been a Production Assistant* on a job I did a year or so ago.)

I explained that I'm already booked for next week and he says, "That's no problem. We need the scouting done right away. Could you scout tomorrow and over the weekend?" That voice in my head that wonders if the phone will ever ring again started nattering and I agreed (unenthusiastically), that I could probably do that.

Now comes the part where the caller usually tells me what they're looking for. This is where he'd say, "It's a commercial for such-and-such-product and the Mom is in her kitchen with her three crazed kids and 'so-and-so' shows up at the door and saves the day with the Wonder-Product." They usually want to send me a script. Or a storyboard. Or a synopsis. They usually want to tell me that it'd be great if the kitchen had modern reproductions of 1940's appliances and maybe some exposed brick and a skylight. And copper cookware hanging down from a rack. And the kids' drawings all over the refrigerator. And there MUST be a center island in the kitchen. Frankly, they usually want to tell me more than I need to know to get the job done.

This guy's version of telling me what they're looking for consisted of telling me they need to shoot near the end of November and they need a place with two different rooms (that could "even be in two different cities"), to shoot over the course of three days. He tells me they've looked at random Manhattan Address - (as if I have a photographic archive in my head of every Manhattan address) - and how that would be perfect except that it only fits about 10 people and they need space for 50 people. This is all he tells me. What he's told me is nothing.

He's told me that they need a couple of rooms that hold 50 people. He hasn't told me if this is for a commercial or a TV series or a feature film or an infomercial or a documentary about NASCAR widows. He's told me that they need two rooms that hold 50 people.

Hmmmm, The Possibilities.

There are a lot of lecture halls that hold 50 people.

The Yankees' locker room will hold 50 people.

No problem at all getting 50 people into The Rainbow Room.

Hell! I can cram 50 people into a little corner the the Hunts Point Fish Markets!

There's also the question of what's happening in this room that needs to hold 50 people. What exactly are those 50 people going to be doing? Is it a scene about some Gala Charity Ball with 50 guests and he's not including the crew in his description? Maybe they've got a crew of 50 people to shoot two people having an intimate conversation.

The thought crosses my mind that this may be something that has to be kept under wraps until it's released to the masses!

I've worked on things like that before. Most people have. These are the things that Non-Disclosure Agreements were invented for. It's really hard to have people shoot the commercial meant to promote your exciting brandy-new top-secret product without telling them what the brandy-new top-secret product is.

For the moment, I decided to give up on that line of questioning. I asked what kind of schedule they're on. He tells me the producers would like me to come into the office first thing in the morning and show them some possibilities. Uh...What? I'm supposed to have possibilities to show them before they tell me what I'm looking for? Before I get a chance to look for the thing that I-don't-know-what-it-is? I'm starting to think he doesn't want a scout so much as he wants a Locations Library. These are more common in L.A. than they are in New York, but there are companies here that just have a bunch of stuff on file** for you to look through. I suggest that he might want to go in that direction. He calls me back five minutes later to tell me, No, we want a Location Manager/Scout, not a service. They just want you to make your calls from the office so they can watch your process.

My PROCESS? My PROCESS is that you tell me what the fuck you want to shoot and when the fuck you want to shoot it and how the fuck much you have to pay for it I go out and find it. That's my process.

I was starting (OK, I had already started a while ago), to get a bad feeling about this gig. I went back to trying to find out what they actually want to shoot. After two more phone calls, he cheerfully announces, "It's a commercial!" That's all he has to tell me that he hasn't already told me.

I tactfully expressed my regrets that I didn't think I was the guy they wanted to hire. I tried telling him that I wasn't sure I could deliver what they wanted in the way they wanted it. I tried telling him I wasn't sure I understood their expectations so I wasn't sure I could meet them. I tried everything short of saying "I'm not at all sure you people have the first clue what you're doing". No matter how I tried to say, "It's not you; it's me", he just didn't want to accept it.

Eventually, I just told him I was sorry but he was going to have to find someone else. And I'm still not entirely sure what the hell it was all about. And on top of all that, I'm not 100% sure I didn't commit some terrible faux pas (to be revealed at a later date), by turning down the Ambiguous-Enigmatic-Incomprehensible Mystery Job of 2011. Since it's more likely that some other poor schmuck of a Location Manager is now pulling his hair out, I'll manage to live with it. But I'll always wonder What the hell was that all about?

Update: A couple of the comments seem geared toward making sure I don't feel too bad about turning down this job. Don't worry. Sure, I'll have doubts about whether or not I did the right thing...but they're really minor doubts. I'm not seriously second-guessing myself. Also (and this is important), I'm not willing to assign the blame to the P.A. based on what little evidence I've got. It's entirely plausible that he's just a victim of his boss's instructions.
---------------------------------
*Getting the call from a Production Assistant doesn't set off any alarm bells, nor should it. It's common for Producers to assign a P.A. to make a bazillion calls to see who's available and then the Producer gets involved. Or the P.A. might have come up in the world. That's where Coordinators and Production Managers and Producers come from. (Rumors to the contrary, Producers are not just hatched with that alarming temperament.)

**Locations Libraries (or Services) and Location Managers are really two separate types of businesses. I could go into a long explanation of why the two different business models exist, but suffice it to say, Location Manager tend to come onto a project and start from scratch each time.

Occupy Easy Street -- Signal Lost -- GPS Rerouting.

2011-11-01T21:54:00.000-04:00

An overwhelmingly large percentage of people

had an easier time reading this

after clicking on it

to activate biggification.

This Is A Thing? Yes, This Is Definitely A Thing!

2011-10-28T11:08:00.001-04:00

Quite some time ago, I was a little surprised when every media outlet in the universe went batshit over the fact that Michelle Obama had appeared in public wearing shorts. Shocking! Shocking, I said. (Actually, I think I settled on "Meh".)

The latest thing the world is wetting its panties over is the fact that Kate Middleton has a SCAR!

As usual, I can't be bothered to actually read all of the associated stories or do any other kind of research, but from what I have read (the headlines), I gather that this scar is the result of some "serious childhood operation" and it left a "huge" scar! (It doesn't seem all that huge in the photos, but for all I know, it snakes around for a few more feet under her hairline and then dives down her back - artfully hidden behind the shoulder straps of anything she's wearing. Who am I to debate what "huge" means?)

I think in this case, I'm going to have to agree that this may, in fact be A THING! There are a couple of things to consider.

First of all, in some ancient cultures* prospective royalty was required to strip naked in front of their subjects-to-be and demonstrate that they were unblemished in any way. Bodily imperfections were deemed a disqualification for Royal Succession, ("strange women lying in ponds distributing swords", notwithstanding). The British Monarchy seems to have abandoned this benchmark of perfection and, in fact, some news story I was almost paying attention to this morning did a serious expose' on all of the other Royal scars in evidence. (For a family that mostly sits around being fanned and fed grapes by liveried retainers, those guys sure manage to hurt themselves a lot. It's a good thing they seem to have bred out that nasty strain of hemophilia that dogged European Royalty for so long.)

The second and much more important consideration is this; just what produced that "huge" scar? It'd be one thing if the Palace had announced that she got it when she got clocked in the head in an unfortunate incident when a playmate hopped off of the other side of a Teeter-Totter. (It's amazing how hard it is to find a list of Britishisms for playground equipment, so I just settled on one that sounded poncy to me.) I'd also totally be okay with an explanation that described her past involvement with a roving band of 8-year-olds beating the crap out of their rivals in the school cafeteria. There's certainly honorable precedent for warlike Monarchs and having a nascent Valkyrie in the Royal Succession would be pretty damned cool.

But that's not what happened! The Palace says it was a "serious childhood operation". And I want to know what was the purpose of the operation. For all we know, they removed her little baby brain and replaced it with saved specimens from HITLER'S BRAIN!** Do you know that Kate isn't whispering sweet nothings about Volksgemeinschaft and Lebensraum in William's ear every night? This could be evidence of a long ranging plan to reassert Empire and British WORLD DOMINATION! I don't know about you but I've never trusted that queen they've got.

Or it could be a harbinger of an ALIEN INVASION! Those movies you've seen may just be part of a conspiracy to make you believe that aliens implant themselves in peoples' torsos and then come bursting out of their chests all gory and drooly and covered in stuff that looks like milk that's three days past its expiration date! Maybe the aliens don't need to pop out once they're implanted in a nice cozy human brain. And then, you get one of them married into the Royal Family and - BLAMMO! - no need for any of that silly "Take me to your leader" nonsense.***

I'm not saying this has to be an evil plot for world domination (although that's the most likely situation). It's also possible that Rupert Murdoch was just planning ahead (or a head - get it?), and had Kate implanted with a camera and recording device years ago! Keep your eyes peeled for News Corp coming up with completely unexplainable inside scoops. Paying off butlers and hacking cell phones is so 2010!

The fact is, there are all sorts of explanations for what that "serious childhood operation" was all about. And most of them are NOT GOOD.

I think this bears some protracted, irrational, paranoid vigilance.

--------------------------------------
*In keeping with my habit of conscientious, in-depth research, this "fact" comes from some fictional Fantasy series I read at some time since I've been alive and reading. Challenging my facts and/or conclusions would be most unsporting and petty of you.

**How, you might ask would the British have gotten their hands on Hitler's brain samples? Well, everyone knows that the Russians got to Berlin first at the end of WWII. And everyone knows they covered up the real story behind Hitler's demise. And everyone knows the KGB kept Hitler's Brain in a jar for decades. So anyway, 1989 and Glasnost rolls around and little Kate would have been just 7 years old. And the Queen could easily have challenged Gorbachev to prove how much the Soviets were changing by getting him to hand over some HitlerBrainChunks™to be installed in a future bride for her Grandson. Those Royals have a long history of betrothing infants to each other. Maybe the Queen had HitlerBrainChunk™ surgery performed on thousands of little prospective future brides. It's not so far-fetched. You do the math!

***I don't know if the Queen is involved in this scenario or not, but it wouldn't surprise me one little bit.

My Alma Mater Jumps on the Bandwagon. But Its a Fine Bandwagon.

2011-10-27T10:58:00.000-04:00

Fellow Emerson College Alumnus, Eric (no, not that Eric, the other one), pointed me to this video on FaceBook today. I approve.

Since most of you won't have a clue what half of the in-jokes are all about, I'll risk a spoiler to show you the part that really spoke to me.

Truth be told, a lot of the in-jokes are so current that they went over my head too, but...laundry machines that text you? Sweet!

Take That Home With You. You Can't Leave It Here!

2011-10-25T12:31:00.000-04:00

Today's missive is about stuff you don't want anymore. Or stuff that comes into your possession...that you'd rather never to have possessed. Here's a key thing to keep in mind: If you don't want something, odds are nobody else wants it either.

I think we can all agree that nobody loves dog shit. Most places make you pick up after your dog and dispose of its output somewhere other than the sidewalk. That's a good thing. Most people obey this rule out of good citizenship or the possibility of being shamed by witnesses. I'd lay odds that actual enforcement isn't needed all that often. And honestly, unless a cop witnesses someone walking away from their beloved Fifi's deposit, what enforcement options are there? Yes, I'll admit that when pooper scooper laws first went into effect, I had visions of cops leaving tickets on steaming piles all over the place. I was a little puzzled about what this might achieve.

But it turns out that some people are really concerned about enforcement. In Fairfax, VA, a case is about to go to court because one woman has accused another woman of not cleaning up after the dog she walks. The Plaintiff's got pictures of the alleged poop to present as evidence. The article goes on to talk about some places that make you register your dog's DNA so that offending poops can later be matched to the miscreant for prosecution.

This may seem overzealous to some of you, but I totally understand. As you should know, we have three cats. One of them -- and I'm not sure which one -- has particularly smelly poops and you can't go anywhere near the litter box for like 15 minutes after he--or she-- has been in there. If I could only assign blame I might be able to do something about this problem. I'm not sure what I'd do about it, but I think figuring out which one is the mad bomber would be a good first step. Gimme a break--I can only think of so many things at one time.

Right here in New York, the Metropolitan Transit Authority has decided that there's too much garbage being left in the subways. To combat this problem, they've come up with an idea that's sheer GENIUS! They're running a pilot program where they've removed trash cans from a few stations. This makes perfect sense to me. If someone throws trash on the platform because they're too lazy to hold onto it until they can navigate the 50 feet to the next trash can, of course they'll hold onto it until they can get up to the street and find one.

The garbage train will be a thing of the past in no time.

I think we can extend this logic to solving some other problems. It's one thing dealing with stuff that actual New Yorkers need to get rid of every day, but the city is further burdened by stuff that visitors want to get rid of. There are a couple of million commuters who come into the city every day and a bunch of them drive. There are trucks that come into the city every day to make deliveries. And what do they all have in common? They create exhaust. And they leave it here. I don't think it's too much to require that anyone driving in from outside of the city limits should be required to have a hose pumping the exhaust into the passenger compartment for storage until they leave the city again. I realize this might cause a big buildup of exhaust at places like the New Jersey side of the GW Bridge, but let New Jersey figure out what to do with it. If they're so great, let them come up with somewhere for those guys to work on their side of the bridge.

We also have a lot of tourists visiting the city. According to something I found on the internet without looking very hard, there are almost 70,000 hotel rooms in NYC. Now based on my usual strategy of making stuff up, let's assume that 85% of those rooms are filled on any particular day. And let's further assume there's an average of 2.87654 people in each of those occupied rooms. That translates into more than 6.8 BILLION people visiting the city every year. (My math may be a little off, but it's pretty damned close -- just stick with me.)

We like that those people all eat in the city. They help keep our restaurants and our street vendors employed. But an unfortunate result of all that eating is that they digest that food while they're still here. And that's putting a real burden on the city's sewage treatment facilities. I don't think it would be unreasonable to remove the toilets from those 70,000 hotel rooms. That astronaut lady who drove from Texas to Florida a few years ago to resolve a love triangle wore a diaper for the trip. I've seen what they call toilets in some parts of the world and wearing a diaper (and taking it home with you), doesn't seem like such a bad trade off!

I bet there are a lot of other ways we could keep New York cleaner if we just put our minds to it.

Political Piety And The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypsapalooza

2011-10-19T10:09:00.000-04:00

Question: What's the difference between a smelly guy screaming at you on a street corner and a few guys with $500 haircuts who get a lot of airtime on Fox? Answer: Ya got me.

I suppose I may be suffering from a bit of selective amnesia, but I can't remember a Presidential Campaign season so filled with candidates who really, really, really didn't want to run, but God told them they had to. Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have all explained that to some extent or another, their campaigns are divinely inspired. In Michele's case, since she has to defer to her husband in everything, I'm assuming the actual instructions were delivered through him. And it was Anita Perry who "saw the burning bush" and passed on God's mandate to Rick. (For months, Sarah Palin claimed to be waiting for a sign from God and I have a hard time believing He never gave her the word or told her not to run. It's a lot more likely she was prattling on about something or other and just missed the message.)

I mean, c'mon; think about it. Even the most religious people look at you a little funny when you start saying God's been talking to you.

God says "Make Crazy Harry next Pope or We show you what Great Flood was like."

Even back when you couldn't walk six feet without tripping over one God or another, your neighbors were likely to just ignore you when you started saying things like "God doesn't want you eating oysters. He told me so"!

Moses took 40 years of shit for claiming he was having conversations with God.

(Oops, wrong Moses movie.)

And Moses didn't just say, "Trust me. God's got our back". He had evidence! He had Egyptian-smiting plagues, parting of seas and food dropping out of the sky twice a day -- always an open table, no waiting! Think about it; Moses gives them 40 years of miracles and the best he can get out of the Israelites is "Sure he's bug-fuck crazy, but he's got the map. What're ya gonna do?"

I don't know about you - (he uttered rhetorically with a wink) - but I have a problem with candidates who hear voices and make decisions based on them.

March 4, 2013; 3:21a.m. (in a scary potential White House bedroom):

Anita:"Wake up Rick! God's on the hotline!"
Rick: "I'm sleeping, dear. Can you take a message?"
Anita: "Riiiiiick! It's God. And He sounds peeved!"
Rick: "Fine, Honey. Just give me the highlights."
Anita: "Well, some of it is more impressions than specific information, but the gist seems to be that you're supposed to walk in a counterclockwise circle around the Lincoln Memorial 7 times while playing a trumpet next Tuesday. Then you should offer up 3 white sheep, 2 chickens and a yearling ox as a burnt offering to the Lord. After you've finished with that, He wants you to smite the Hittites. And He's not pleased with the Log Cabin Republicans, either. He thinks they could use a little smiting too."
Rick: "Uh huh. I'm not sure I can act on such a vague message but I'll take it up with the Cabinet in the morning. Was there anything else?"
Anita: "Yes. He thinks we should pay a State Visit to Hedonism II. And redecorate The Residence."

It's not that I deny the possibility that God is instructing half of the Republican contenders; I just have a healthy bit of skepticism about it. I mean, why isn't He picking just one horse and betting the farm on that one? Or maybe one of them really has the Supreme Blessing and the other ones are just delusional pikers? And how long before they start outing each other?

17th Republican Candidates Debate:

Moderator: "Governor Perry. If you are elected as the next President and find yourself having to work with a Democrat dominated Congress, how do you intend to get your programs enacted?"

Rick Perry: "Well, let me just quote Ezekiel -- 'And as for them, whether they listen or not – for they are a rebellious house – they will know that a prophet has been among them'."

Michelle Bachmann (interrupting): "Governor, I knew Ezekiel! Ezekiel was a friend of mine! Governor, you're no Ezekiel!"

Audience: "SMITE! SMITE! SMITE! SMITE!"

It's not like there aren't a few precedents for God telling one guy to pass on an important message and then watching while all of His children just point and laugh at the guy. You'd think after all this time, He might try telling the rest of us what He has in mind and which guy to vote for. I don't want to tell God how to do his business -- I'm just sayin'.

I don't suppose any of this makes any difference since I'm planning to vote for Obama, whichever horse the Republicans choose to put in the race. I will, however reconsider that decision if only one Republican is left standing because all of the others fell victim to frogs, boils, locusts and diseased livestock. Hey, I'm skeptical, but it's not like you have to hit me over the head to get through to me.

Just Some Stuff That Needed To Be Photographed.

2011-10-16T00:32:00.000-04:00

Tiles in Courtlandt Street subway station.

Progress on the World Trade Center:

A bevy of NewsVans at Occupy Wall Street:

Perpetual Care: 19th Century Manhattan Style.

2011-10-12T09:16:00.001-04:00

One of the older landmarks from early Manhattan is Trinity Church and the attached cemetery down on Broadway at the foot of Wall Street. It dates back to 1696. Some time in the early 1800's New York City decided there shouldn't be any more burials in Manhattan south of Canal Street, so Trinity Church bought a parcel of land at what was then, the north end of Greenwich Village; on Hudson Street between Clarkson and Leroy Streets. (The spot now labeled James J. Walker Park).

On that spot, they established the St. John's Burying Ground. Here's a shot from the NY Public Library's archives showing the cemetery while it was fully established. (Note the large monument on the right side of the frame; it's where we'll be going.)

As the 19th Century went on, that block of Leroy Street became fashionable and wealthy residents built townhouses there and changed the name of the block to St. Luke's Place. Ultimately, they decided it would be much more pleasant to live across the street from a park instead of a cemetery. By this time, it's estimated that there were approximately 10,000 people buried there (although only about 1000 had gravestones). In 1896, the city took over the property under Eminent Domain and gave the church two years to move all of the bodies to their new cemetery at 155th Street and Broadway.

As far as I can determine, the church took the attitude that the city had unfairly appropriated their land and now all of the bodies were their problem. Roughly 250 families paid to have their loved ones moved uptown and the rest were, apparently plowed under.

The new park was designed by the firm of Carrere and Hastings, later famous for designing the main branch of the New York Public Library that stands at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. The park they designed, St. James Park was a Victorian garden with lush landscaping, a lagoon, a gazebo and a sunken garden. The only evidence of it having been a cemetery was that they retained (albeit in a different location), the monument I mentioned from the above photo.

For some reason, after only seven years, it was decided that the neighborhood needed a playground instead of a Victorian garden and the park was changed again. The next time anyone was reminded that the playground had once been a cemetery was in 1939 during another round of renovations. Workmen hit an underground vault and unearthed a small casket. The casket had been designed to mimic an Egyptian sarcophagus and had a silver plaque identifying its occupant as Mary Tisdall, aged 6 years and 8 months. She had died on April 14, 1850. According to The New York World-Telegram "The girl's cast iron casket...had a glass window in the top. Her white silk dress still looked fresh and dainty. After 89 years you could still see that she'd been a pretty yellow haired child."

The park has been renovated a number of times since then and renamed for former mayor (and St. Luke's Place resident), James J. Walker. Here's a bit of what it looks like now, viewed from Hudson Street. (Yeah, I just did a screengrab from GoogleStreet.)

And that monument I referred to a couple of times? It now sits on the north side of the park near the entrance on Leroy Street.

I'm guessing they saved it because it was attractive (and the largest monument in the cemetery) as opposed to any real sense of reverence. Based on the fact that most of the bodies were never moved from where they were originally interred, it's doubtful they bothered to move the bodies associated with this monument when they relocated it.

Here's the monument as it looks today.

Those are a couple of firemen's helmets and a hose-nozzle on the top.

The north side of the marker is engraved:

Here are interred the bodies of Eugene Underhill aged 20 years 7 months and 9 days and Frederick A. Ward aged 22 years 1 month and 16 days who lost their lives by the falling of a building while engaged in the discharge of their duty as Firemen on the first day of July MDCCCXXXIV (1834)

The south side reads:

This monument is erected by the members of Eagle Fire Engine Company No 13 in connection with the friends of the deceased to commemorate the sad event connected with their death and the loss which they deplore

This bronze plaque is on the east side of the marker, the only nod toward the fact that a few thousand people are still buried under the ball fields and swing sets.

It looks like there was another plaque on the west side of the monument at one time, but that one is missing.

I hope Eugene and Frederick and all of their neighbors are sports fans.

There Are Enough "Quotes Of The Day" To Go Around.

2011-10-09T19:57:00.002-04:00

"Yeah, now I gotta go find some drowning babies to save before the next family reunion. This is some bullshit." -Retta Sirleaf (Parks & Recreation) on learning that her aunt, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was named a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

"Choose Your Battles Wisely" Is Probably Really Good Advice.

2011-10-09T12:02:00.000-04:00

Really good advice tends to be wasted on me.

So I'm taking this opportunity to publicly announce that Retractable Dog Leashes and I are now mortal enemies. Henceforth, they are officially my Evil Nemesis and I will not rest* until I've eliminated them from the landscape. And because I'm so brave and courageous,** I'm not even launching this as a sneak attack. Retractable Dog Leash people; from here on, I'm in your face!***

An example of my Evil Nemesis.****

You're probably wondering why I'm so incensed about Retractable Dog Leashes (hereinafter RDL's).***** Honestly, there are certainly more pressing issues I might choose to take on. I get that. But I have my reasons for choosing this as my CAUSE, and I'll get back to that. In the meantime, my loathing for RDL's is born of the following facts:

-RDL's provide no actual benefit to dog owners/walkers.
-RDL's provide no actual benefit to dogs.
-RDL's require an extensive list of "Do's and Dont's" to avoid hurting yourself/others/your dogs. (scroll down a bit on the "directions" tab of the link.)
-RDL owners have never read the list of "Do's and Don'ts".

Let's get a bit more specific. Maybe you think it might be good to have a leash that allows your dog to run ahead of you a bit. "Oooh", you think. "I can hit the release button and Fifi can run at her own speed while I amble along at a relaxed pace". Well, sure...that'll work for about ten or fifteen or 20 feet, depending on how obnoxiously long of a leash you've bought. Then Fifi gets drawn up short when she hits the limit. I'll admit there's something mildly amusing about watching Fifi's ass slide out from under her while her yappy little head becomes a stationary object, but how often can you indulge your sadist funny bone before it becomes old? And if you're planning on running with your dog anyway, is there really any advantage to you or your dog to be gained from being further away from each other? Your dog is not stupid enough to feel like he's suddenly alone running free. He's still tugging on his leash because you'll never be fast enough to keep up with him.

Or maybe you think, "Oh, this'll be good because I can stand on the sidewalk while Bigfoot drops a load in that thicket of underbrush I don't feel like navigating". This is stupid because you'll either A.) have to navigate it anyway in a minute to scoop up Bigfoot's poop, or B.) you're planning to leave it there, in which case you now suck for reasons in addition to being a twit who needs to be twenty feet away from your dog. Repeat after me: If you're in a place where you need to have your dog on a leash, you're in a place where you can't walk away from his steamers.

I'm not going to comment on the problem of the leash suddenly retracting and popping you a good one in the eye. Or the dog taking off while the leash is wrapped around your finger/hand/wrist and amputating the offending extremity. These are your problems and I'm not going to waste time worrying about your problems. We're here to talk about how you're causing me problems.

You, the clueless RDL user are causing me problems because you're walking down the street talking on your cell phone or yakking with your friend while Behemoth the Giant Mastiff runs brainlessly and randomly back and forth over the sidewalk as I approach and he knows perfectly well he can wrap that twenty foot lead around my ankles. He knows perfectly well that you think the whole "let's get innocent bystanders involved in walkies" is so cute. Or that you're so involved in everything but walking your dog that you'll be oblivious.

The final straw came for me yesterday when I was walking home. As I'm crossing the last intersection before getting to my house, I encounter a woman walking her dog. She's crossing the intersection at a ninety degree angle to me. And when she gets to the curb, her dog (a piddly little dachshund), balks. All twelve pounds of this little dog sits down and refuses to step up onto the sidewalk. So the woman, who clearly has difficulties with the concept of who is the "Alpha" in this relationship, walks twenty feet further while letting out her RDL. When the dog refuses to follow her, she sits down on the sidewalk and tries (without success) to convince her dog to come to her. She clearly thinks this is fucking adorable. I think I've carried fifty pounds of groceries for the last eight blocks and I shouldn't have to play limbo or jump-rope just to get the last 100 yards between me an my house.

I realize that this is a completely futile crusade I'm launching here. My clandestine glaring and facemaking won't have any of their desired effects no matter how intimidating I manage to make them. And direct confrontation on the street isn't terribly effective either.****** But, in the long run, I'll probably be less disappointed when this futile crusade yields less results than I would be if I took on any of a large list of other futile crusades. I have very limited expectations.

That's some wise battle choosing, right?

P.S. I realize there are other symbols available to denote multiple footnotes but I totally forgot how to make things show up as superscripts, so you're stuck with multiple asterisks. Maybe relearning that bit of info would be a worthy cause for me.
------------------------
*"will not rest" is totally just a figure of speech. I'll probably go to bed shortly after I publish this. In fact, I'm kinda tired and I may just finish writing this in the morning. One really shouldn't initiate hostilities without a good night's rest.

**What? Like the massively powerful Retractable Dog Leash lobby is gonna put a hit out on me? Oooooh, I'm so scared.

***"in your face" is also probably a figure of speech. I'll probably satisfy myself with clandestine glaring and/or making faces behind your backs. But it'll be really confrontational clandestine glaring and face making.

****Dear "Great Choice", I don't hate your product in particular; I hate the entire product line regardless of manufacturer. You just happened to have one of the best pictures available online. Please don't sue me. You should be honored. Really. Please don't sue me. Or sic the massively powerful Retractable Dog Leash lobby on me. And don't sue me. Please?

*****You probably don't give a shit about why I'm so incensed about RDL's, but humor me, please.

******I've run into this guy a few times in the neighborhood and he says something snotty every time we encounter each other. Next time it happens I'm gonna follow him around the neighborhood while chain smoking. Confront that dude!

Yesterday's News Today.

2011-10-07T16:52:00.001-04:00

I'm posting the results for Michelle's weekly Thursday Photo Challenge only a day late. That's practically like time traveling to be early. For me, anyway.

Let's start with Round:

We'll move on to Square:

Which is a bit of an anachronism since New York doesn't seem to know the definition of a square. Washington Square is one of the only square squares in the city. And I think even that is a rectangle. Madison Square Garden is decidedly circular. Most Squares in NY are really Triangles.

Times Square? A bunch of triangles.
Herald Square? Triangles.

I didn't have a helicopter handy but I assure you, Abingdon Square is a big freakin' triangle.

For the traditionalists among you, here's a "stay the hell off my triangle" triangle.

I did better than I expected with Sticky

Procrastination is surprisingly difficult to come upon in visual form. And to be perfectly honest, I'm pretty sure this has graduated from "I'll finish cutting it down someday", to "I bet it'll fall down all by itself eventually".

And, last but not least, we have faith. Well, I don't have it but this guy does. I think. (It's also entirely possible he's proclaiming a lack of faith, but I'm not looking a gift bumper sticker in the mouth...as it were.)

In Which I Deliver An Impassioned And Eloquent Commentary On The Hank Williams, Jr. Contretemps.

2011-10-06T18:56:00.001-04:00

The guy's kind of a putz, isn't he?

It's Official. My Secret Weapon Has Been Perfected.

2011-10-03T11:19:00.001-04:00

I've kept this quiet, but my blog contains a sedative that, until now, has only been capable of reaching actual readers. As of last Friday, I am now able to indiscriminately inflict my weaponized soporific upon anyone within a 3 mile radius...whether they read the blog or not.

Tune in later this week when I'll make the Lion lay down with the Lamb...or the cops and the protesters on Wall Street.

I'm Probably Doing This Wrong But I'm Willing To Risk It.

2011-10-02T14:54:00.002-04:00

I don't think I've ever actually recycled a post before. I know that I made a conscious decision I wouldn't do that when I first started blogging because:

A.) It seemed lazy to me.
B.) It was a clear signal that the blogger (me) had nothing to talk about
and
C.) Reasons A and B seemed particularly pathetic when I had been blogging for less than a year.

As time went on, I started to take a perverse pride in never having recycled a post.

Today, I announce that my pride, perverse or otherwise, is willing to take a hit. Ah well.

Here's the thing, though. Most people, when they get around to recycling posts, seem to choose one of two options. Either they pull up what they think is a post from their "Greatest Hits", or the go to the archives and choose a post the re-iterates a stand they've taken about something that may be current again. (More accurately, I think they pull up a post from the past intended to say, "Remember when I said this and nobody else was talking about it at all? Well I was right then and I'm right now, so nyah, nyah, nyah; bask in my personal brilliance!)

Anyway, I'm pulling up a post from the past because I've got nothing to babble about today. And I figured I'd pull up a previous post where I babbled about having nothing to babble about. Or nothing worth babbling about. At least, not babbling well.

Remember how Seinfeld was a show about nothing? Well, sometimes, Polybloggimous is a blog about having nothing to blog about. Or sometimes it's a blog about blogging not well about blogging and having nothing to blog about.

Or something.

With that in mind...Sherman, set the WABAC machine to 2010!

Postus Interruptus
August 24, 2010

I've tried to make it clear that Polybloggimous is all about you! I don't mean it's about you -- clearly, most of the stuff here is about me -- but I really try to make sure I'm taking you into account before ever hitting that PUBLISH POST button. I really don't want to put stuff here that's just going to leave you scratching your heads or wondering WTF, or especially thinking, "Holy Crap. why is Nathan bugging us with crap like this?"

Yesterday, I wrote a post that was intended to riff on PBS's Sunday cooking shows and then introduce you to an idea I had for my very own cooking show -- Medieval British Cuisine. On the face of it, this should have been at least mildly promising. Primal Grill really is episode after episode of Forty Guys Make a Hamburger. New Scandinavian Cooking really is a weekly exercise in cooking outdoors for no discernible reason whatsoever. Not only do they cook everything outdoors -- last week, they buried a roast in a hole in the ground to cook it -- they also have their chefs stand knee-deep in a fjord if they're making seafood. 'Cause you couldn't possibly understand how seafood might have made it all the way to the shore. And I actually like Colameco's Food Show, but I'm willing to admit that the show consists entirely of the host watching chefs make things, and then he tastes the stuff and then he grunts a lot. It's Tool Time, just about making food instead of building manly stuff.

So, anyway, I figured I could come up with some ideas for a show about Medieval British Cuisine -- surely an oxymoron if there ever was one. I kind of envisioned episodes about peasants poaching deer from the Lord's estates. There'd be stuff about how to prepare a hearty acorn stew with rocks! Maybe some tips on dealing with spoiled food -- eat it, of course, do you want to starve?

And my "best" idea had something to do with making your livestock last. If you wanted meat, you could just amputate one of your goat's legs. That would give you enough meat for a couple of meals, and your goat would just limp a little until you got hungry again. Not to mention, if you propped up the goat's rear end, you could still milk it.

As you may be realizing by now, the entire idea of the post was a recipe for disaster (no pun intended - really). I have deleted the whole thing with impunity.

And, no matter how painful you may have found this post to read, it doesn't hold a candle to the sheer craptaculous-ness that the actual post would have inflicted upon you. You may thank me at your leisure.

P.S. I may have deleted the post, but I'm still willing to use my blog-fail as blog-fodder. This may be crappy content, but it is content.

P.P.S. Here's a picture that would have made it into the post somewhere. Consider it the visual equivalent of pounding a square peg into a round hole.

What's Wrong With This Picture? Ohhhhh, Pretty Much Everything.

2011-09-29T14:47:00.000-04:00

If you don't live in my neck of the woods, you can be forgiven for not being aware of The State of New Jersey Vs. MTV's Jersey Shore (which is totally figurative at the moment but - I predict - will become a real-live court case in the foreseeable future). New Jersey, like many other states enacted a Tax Incentive a few years ago to bring film and TV projects to their state. The various programs are all different, but the general shape of them is, if you come spend money in our state, we'll give you a break on taxes you incur while you're here. Predictably, I think this is a fine idea (especially in places close to home like NY, NJ and CT). YMMV.

The short version is that Jersey Shore applied for the credit for their first year of production and they qualified. A couple of weeks ago, NJ finished their review of Jersey Shore's submitted accounting and announced that the show had qualified for a $420,000 tax credit.

The State promptly succumbed to a cranial aneurysm, e-bola, and arrhythmia. News cameramen who usually have to chase politicians down the courthouse steps suddenly required crowd control so they could keep their shots limited to one bloviator at a time. Everybody wanted to be the first to denounce the tax credit.

Where to start?

Fine, we'll start with the way the story was reported. WPIX's headline was, NJ Taxpayers Paying $420,000 to cover Production Costs for 'Jersey Shore'. The clear inference was that NJ was, somehow, partnering with MTV or footing the bill for the honor of having them shoot in the state. Every other news story I ran across used some variation on that theme. The problem is that that's a completely inaccurate depiction -- it just makes for a more sensational story.

If you spend just, oh, 30 seconds running around the internet, you can find the actual statute for NJ's tax incentive. The high points are:

New Jersey offers a tax credit in an amount equal to 20% of qualified production expenses, available to production companies meeting certain criteria, chiefly:
At least 60% of the total expenses of a project, exclusive of post-production costs, will be incurred for services performed and goods used or consumed in New Jersey (emphasis mine).

In short, to qualify for a BIG tax credit, you have to spend BIG money in the state.

How did Jersey Shore spend money? I don't have the details for that season, but according to the the NJ Film Commission, here is part of what they spent money on during the summer of 2011:

-4,000 hotel room-nights for 125 crew members
-50 local construction jobs
-10 police officers hired daily for several months (the bill for this usually covers the officers' time PLUS an administrative fee paid to the department or municipality.)
-45,000 meals purchased in local restaurants
20% increase in paid beach fees and parking revenues.

That's $6 million spent directly in Seaside Heights, NJ and surrounding towns.

Now, you may find yourself saying, why bother giving a credit to Jersey Shore? I mean, where the hell else are they gonna shoot the Jersey Shore, HUH? Oh, I don't know...maybe they could shoot in Italy. The entire idea behind State tax incentives is an acknowledgment that shows can shoot whatever they want, pretty much wherever they want. Revenge is set in The Hamptons and it's shot in North Carolina. The Good Wife is set in Chicago -- and it's shot in New York. You win some; you lose some.

More importantly is an understanding of exactly what the tax credit entails. Contrary to the way it's portrayed, the state doesn't have some guy show up and deliver bags of money to the production office. Once again, the particulars vary from state to state, but in NJ, here's how it works:

-The production submits records of its qualified expenses (i.e. money spent in NJ to the benefit of NJ companies and individuals - which, by the way, will be taxable income for those businesses and individuals).
-The state agency gives them a certificate for the amount of the credit they've qualified for. (That happens a couple of years after the production should have already paid the state any incurred tax liability.)
-In order to realize any actual benefit, the production must now sell their tax credit certificate to a company in New Jersey -- typically a company that has a massive tax liability already (and probably delinquent, as well). Also:
               1.) To find such a company, the production will need to go through a broker -- another
     company doing business in the state who will charge a fee.
                2.) The law stipulates that the purchasing company must pay the production at least 75%
                      of the value of the certificate -- why would they pay more; they're trying to pay they're
   back taxes.
                3.) Whatever amount the production actually gets paid for their certificate is taxable
income in the state.

There's no question that the state is generating income for businesses, individuals and itself, in return for discounting the tax owed. It's money that could have easily gone somewhere else and generated zero income at home.

But discovering these details and conveying them to the public is hard (not so much), so why would a news outlet bother. Much easier to make it sound like that guy with the bags of money ran around paying Jersey Shore's bills for them.

Let's get back to the politicians. I'm not going to bother going back and looking for all of the names, but one State Assemblyman, who supported the tax credit program, demanded that Gov. Christie veto it in this case. Even though the statute is blind to content (aside from porn - "We'll know it when we see it"), he expected to have the tax credit bring in only quality shows. Dude, it's about economic impact, not about having New Jersey be a latter-day Medici Family leaving an artistic legacy. If you want to sponsor worthy art, you should be having some kind of grant program with a completely subjective set of criteria (in which case, incidentally, you will be sponsoring art without regard to economic impact).

Gov. Christie, who to be fair, has always bitched about what a festering piece of crap Jersey Shore is, and has always hated the tax incentives and killed the program when he came into office, first said he didn't have any power to rescind the $420,000 tax credit. A few days later, he decided he could veto it...and promptly did. However you feel about this tax credit specifically, or tax credits in general, the fact is that Jersey Shore followed all the rules, spent all of that money and qualified for it. I have no idea what grounds Christie used for vetoing it, but I'd be shocked if MTV doesn't initiate a lawsuit to get it back.

I've never seen Jersey Shore and I'm fairly certain I'd hate it if I did. But that's not the point. I have no problem with a state deciding they don't think tax incentives for film are a good idea (I disagree, but I'm only a citizen of NY), but if they have a statute, they need to follow it while it's in effect.   And if they're going to have an incentive program, it ought to be strictly mercenary. You can measure actual money spent by a production, but the side benefit of added tourism is a lot more fuzzy. So leave out the subjective part about a film being required to "portray the state in a good light". That's just bullshit.
-----------------------------------------------

P.S. I know that I'm guilty of being a little lazy in reporting this; something I've called WPIX and their colleagues to task for. But they're supposed to be legitimate news sources. I'm just a blabbermouth with a blog. They should really do better than me.

Holy Shit, I Made Bagels!

2011-09-26T09:37:00.001-04:00

In addition to a non-craptacular picture, you'd also be hearing about 5 seconds of a Celestial Choir singing a beautiful chord in unison. I don't know how to do that either, so join with me for a moment, if you will.

Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Here's the thing. There are certain foods that, irrationally, I've always just assumed had to be made by professionals in a professional setting. I distinctly recall the first time Anon GF said she was making Chinese Food for dinner and I just looked at her and said, "Oh, sure. Like you can do that at home." In my defense, we did not then, nor do we now, have one of those big swinging faucets that reach out over the burners on our stove.

We don't have a wok the size of Nebraska either! In her defense, she just looked at me like I was a mildly retarded child and went on to make Chinese Food for dinner.*

Anyway, for some reason I got it into my head yesterday that I should make bagels. I looked around at a variety of recipes and chose one that looked like I might be able to handle it. But let's be honest; I absolutely expected to fuck it up. Imagine my shock, surprise and near ecstasy when they came out looking like bagels and tasting like bagels. With the texture of bagels! A little crunchy on the outside; soft and chewy on the inside.

If you didn't know any better, you'd think they were bagels! And it was really easy. You should try it.

This recipe makes 8 reasonable sized bagels. I decided to make 4 of them plain and to get creative with the other 4. More on this later. You'll need...

4 cups of bread flour
1 tablespoon of sugar
1-1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 teaspoons yeast
1-1/4 (and then an additional 1/4) cup of warm water

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water until it looks like Lake Erie (ugly and frothy). Add the sugar, salt, and oil. Mix that in until it dissolves and then sift in the flour.

Mix this all in your mixer with a bread hook just until all of the flour is incorporated. This is where the additional 1/4 cup of warm water comes in. Depending on how dry the mixture seems, you may need to add a bit more moisture. You want to end up with a fairly stiff dough ball that just releases from the mixing bowl -- I think I ended up using an additional couple of tablespoons of water to get it right.

Dump the mixture out onto your counter and knead it for about ten minutes until smooth. If your forearms aren't singing, you aren't doing it right. Cut the dough into 8 equal parts and let it rest for 20 minutes.

I purposely did my dividing a little sloppy to maintain that "rustic" homemade look. (Also, my name is Elmer J. Fudd; millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht.)

When the 20 minutes of resting time is over is a good time to start preheating your oven to 425º. Also, it's time to form your bagels. For the plain ones, use two hands to roll out little caterpillars just wider than your two hands next to each other. Hold one end of the doughy caterpillar in the palm of your hand; Bring the little guy around the back of your hand; and then mooosh the ends together in your palm. You can roll it up off of your hand like a rubber band and then sorta plump it up before setting it down to rest and rise a little. Also, this is when you should put a big ole pot of water on to boil. (The recipe I used called for plain water. Others call for a sorta malty brine. I'll probably play around with this a bit in the future.)

This is where we'll briefly address the topic of getting creative and adding stuff. If you're just putting stuff on the top, you'll wait until after the next step - the boiling. If you're adding other stuff, that goes inside, this is when you do it. Those two bagels on the upper left had the added step of flattening the little dough caterpillar so I could sprinkle in cinnamon and raisins. Then, I pinched them back into cylinders and formed them into bagels. The problem is...other than being the two biggest bagels, I didn't give myself any way of distinguishing them from the plain bagels. Oh well...surprise bagels are fun. The one on the bottom left is loaded with garlic. I'll let you know, but I'm betting that one is a failure since I doubt the garlic got cooked enough and I'm sure it isn't nice and toasty. Live and learn.

Next step: Boiling.

They don't need long; only a minute or so on each side. The important thing is to make sure your water is boiling decently and that you use a pan with as much surface area as possible. They'll float, so you really only need a few inches of depth, but you want to be able to boil a few at a time. A pair of chop sticks are a really good tool for flipping them in the water with a two-handed non-authentic grip.

When it comes time to take them out of the pot, you'll need to find whatever the best tool is in your house. I tried lifting them out by sticking a chopstick through the middle but that was a mistake. At this point, they've absorbed some water and, in addition to still being really soft, they're relatively heavy. The chopstick through the middle is a good way to mess up the shape.

I had more success with a flat hole-y utensil (that I'm sure has a name). You want to choose something that supports the weight and let's the water drain. Don't worry about it still being damp or getting a small amount of water on your greased baking pan; the hot oven will deal with that. (Also, if you tried to pat them dry on paper towels, they'd stick and that would be bad.)

Sorry about the focus on the last two shots; I cook better than I stand still modeling.

If you're adding toppings - seeds or whatever, now's the time. I probably should have waited til this point to add the garlic.

Now, bake them! Ten minutes on one side. Flip 'em. Ten minutes on the other side. Ding, ding, ding! You've got bagels.

And here are some followup Before & After pics. (Before and after toasting - not eating. That would be gross.)

The Cinnamon-Raisin ones turned out quite nicely, but I think I could improve my cinnamon and raisin distribution.

The garlic bagel needs work. First of all, since I didn't put any garlic on the surface, there are no visible toasty bits, so I had to sniff and cut open two bagels before I found the bagel one. Even the inside wasn't real obvious visibly. But it did taste really good. That's one shredded clove of garlic in that one bagel and it turned out pretty mild and tasty -- not overpoweringly garlicky at all.

Oops! I almost forgot. LuLu didn't help even a little bit.

-------------------------------------
*I'm not sure how authentic it was, but that's fine by me.

More Pictures In One Day? Why, Yes. It's The Thursday Photo Challenge.

2011-09-22T14:34:00.001-04:00

Once again, it's Thursday, and Michelle is making us run around with our cameras snapping away willy-nilly. And this made me realize that my neighborhood is a lot cleaner than it used to be (not a non sequitur at all). Ya see, Michelle had a lot of brown in today's assignment. And my inner eight-year-old wanted a shot of some huge steaming dog crap. (The steam would have been a bonus, but can't ya just picture it?) Anyway, I couldn't find any dog shit! None! I'll tell ya; It's one thing that Bloomberg is outlawing cigarettes everywhere. It's one thing that you can't find any fries done up in month old, gelatinous saturated fat. But I say he's GONE TOO FAR, when you can't find a proper steamer on the sidewalk!

So, while I try to get over my disappointment, here's what I came up with.

Brown Plant Matter

A Brown Man In Brown Clothes and His Brown Truck (Brown Vehicle and Something Else Brown)

Shadow

Sign (and it's something else else brown!)

Season

If A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, Then Here Are A Few Thousand Words. (Plus A Few Word-Words About The Picture-Words)

2011-09-22T11:55:00.000-04:00

While I continue to be lazy about actually writing anything, I'll share a few pictures of stuff I've run across in the last week.

Let's start with this unassuming church. This falls into the category of stuff I'm sure has been there a while, but I just don't seem to have ever noticed.

Nothing unusual here, right? Just a perfectly lovely, if ordinary church. But what's this?

That building behind it (an NYU building) seems awfully close.

There's no church in that church. NYU preserved the front wall and the steeple and built their hi-rise behind it! This gets three polite golf-claps from me.

Next, we've got this item. I'm sure you're all familiar with this famous image.

Well, this next thing falls into the category of stuff I've seen a bunch of times and I never get tired of it. I'm not sure what prompted this guy to create this on his truck, but I like it.

Next, we have a building that I'll forgive myself for never having noticed before. I'm pretty sure that it endured a number of years with some sort of hokey-crappy facade covering the front. And I know that the last time I spent any time on this block, the front was covered in scaffolding during restoration. This is a pretty unique building. I'm pretty sure I've never seen a spiral staircase going up the 3 floors on the front of a building.

And now, last but not least, is a little photo essay I like to call "Photographer on the Downtown Platform shoots woman on an Uptown Train: Pissed, Pissed-er, Pissed-est."

P.S. I thought it was ingenious of me to opt for posting a few pictures I'd already shot instead of going to all the effort of writing something. It turns out that I forgot to reduce the size of these images, so it took for-fucking-ever to upload them. Best laid plans and all that.

Manhattan Wildlife

2011-09-21T09:59:00.000-04:00

Let's be honest; when you think of going somewhere to see wildlife in its natural habitat, the first place you think of is NYC. Right?

Oh, c'mon! Sure you do. We have rats the size of armadillos. And they carry Mac-10's. For every froo-froo, yappy lap dog, there are 37.6 pit bulls who have been released into the wilds by someone who had no idea they could be moody.* There are hoardes of mutant feral cats roaming the streets.** At least once a year, there's a news story about all the wild raccoons in the city. I'm not sure anyone has ever actually seen one but knocked-over garbage cans are all the proof anybody needs.

Anyway, I was out roaming the East Village yesterday in search of a certain building type and happened to wander by The NYC Marble Cemetery. This is a cemetery that was active (as in digging holes and filling them) from 1831 to 1937. Now it's a historic site.

Anyway, I was kinda glancing into the place as I walked past, and the last thought that was running through my head was, "Oooh, I should pay close attention in case there's any of nature's majesty to be witnessed here on East 2nd Street". In fact, what I was thinking was, "Damn, my feet hurt. I wonder if I can make it to the subway before the rush-hour crowd gets there."

As I passed the gate, some movement in a tree caught my eye. It's not every day I see a red-tailed hawk enjoying some fresh pigeon tartare!

I popped off about 150 frames of the guy (or girl...I have no idea how to tell the difference). If you look close, you can see that his (or her) leg is banded, so somebody's got this bird in their records. When I get a chance to go through the rest of the shots, I'll add some more. I'm pretty sure I've got a couple of shots where Mr. Hawk was staring straight at me as if to say, "What the fuck are you looking at", in perfect NY fashion.
----------------------
*Not really. I totally made that up.

**Really. I totally didn't make that up.

Damn, Those Guys Could Make Some Noise!

2011-09-20T21:51:00.001-04:00

I've got a few things I want to put up on the blog, but I haven't got the time (or energy) to get them written up right now. So, here... have a little Sly & The Family Stone from an ABC TV show in 1969.

Two things: 1. I'm kind of amazed that ABC aired this in 1969. Or ever. (You'll know what I'm talking about near the middle of the clip.) And 2. As a kid, I grew up hearing all sorts of great trumpeters, but Cynthia Robinson is the one who made me think playing trumpet would be the coolest thing in the world.

BTW, you may note that the guitars are actually plugged in!

Keeping A Good Thought

2011-09-19T09:43:00.000-04:00

Every time I'm about to start scouting locations for something new, I go through this train of thought:

-I won't see anything worth scouting.
-If I see anything worth scouting, nobody will answer the doorbell.
-If anybody answers the doorbell, they'll "decline the honor" of being scouted.
-If they let me in to scout, what looked promising from the outside will be frighteningly horrible on the inside.
-If the inside is interesting, all of my pictures will be out of focus.

It's never actually this bad, but bothering to charge my camera battery the night before is really an act of supreme optimism.

Wish me luck.

No Parking Today Cuz We Made A Park In The Parking Space Where You Usually Park. Park You!

2011-09-16T14:56:00.000-04:00

Also known as Kill Some Sod For Nature Day. Or something.

Honestly, I know they do this every year and I'm pretty sure I knew what it was all about once upon a time. And I even saw a story online somewhere this morning and I didn't bother to read it. Because, beyond giving me a bit of fodder for the blog today, I don't really care all that much.

Anyway, here are some miniature parks (made in parking spaces) in my neighborhood today.

The first, you'll find outside of a little dress boutique right around the corner from me. I could tell they're the ones who put it up because they've also got some matching balloons on their storefront. I do recall that in previous years, these little parks seemed to be put up by random granola eating, Birkenstock wearing, whale saving individuals, not by businesses on the block. But since (as I've acknowledged), I don't remember what it's all for, I won't get all incensed over the commercialization of Soon-To-Be-Dead-Grass-In-The-Street Day.

As you continue down Myrtle Avenue (I was headed toward the grocery store, after all), you'll pass that place that magically transforms me into a dick. And their little park.

The woman in the picture is not responsible for either of my two previous forced-to-be-a-dick experiences. She is, however a perfect demonstration of how this store projects forced-to-be-a-dick rays clear out onto the sidewalk at me. As I walked up, she was standing on the sidewalk holding her clipboard. Here is the transcript of our brief interaction:

Me: Hey, would you mind sitting in your park so I can get a picture?
She: Sure.

As she sits, the forced-to-be-a-dick ray ZAPS me right in the back of the head.

She: (continued) Do you know what this is all about?
Me: Nope. Don't care.
She: I've got a flyer.
Me: Nope. Just want a picture.
She: We're giving away free green tea samples inside if you'd like one.

This last was too much. So I shot her.

OK, I didn't turn into that much of a dick, but I did say something neutral-ish and continued on my way.

Lastly, we have one right across the street from the grocery store. Like I said, I don't remember the point of the entire exercise, but I kinda doubt it's about providing extra seating space for restaurants. Having said that, I don't know if I should give it a break because it was set up by the folks who own a little coffee shop I really like or if I should be all-on-my-high-horse because it was set up by the folks next door who I don't know from a hole in the wall. It's also possible that they set it up together, in which case I'll just let the voices in my head duke it out.

C'mon Meredith. Gimme A Call.

2011-09-15T14:41:00.000-04:00

I have a habit of watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and That Other Game Show Which Shall Remain Nameless (where that guy with the initials "A" and "T" tells three people answers and they have to say the question) and hollering at the screen a lot because, of course, I know all the answers. So every time I see that one of them is having auditions (online or not), I try to get my ass on the show. O.K., not really every time, but I've taken that online quiz for The Other Game Show Which Shall Remain Nameless a few times and since I've never heard back from them I'll have to assume they were grading from the wrong set of answers.

And once, about 5 years ago, I went in and tried out for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. There were about 300 people in an auditorium and they gave us a test in the form of a booklet which kinda made the SAT's seem like a short pop quiz. On that occasion, I passed the test (with maybe 1/3rd of the other people) and went off to the Interview Segment of the tryout. I'm not sure what happened to me in the interview. I sat down with two of their Associate Producers (I assume that's what they were) for about 5 minutes and proceeded to wow them with the fact that I had apparently forgotten how to speak English. This did not impress them and I never heard from them again.

So, yesterday, for no reason I can recall, I went on their website and discovered that they were in the midst of holding auditions for the Fall Season. I signed up around 12:30 in the afternoon. I wandered off to do other things. At 4:00pm, I checked my email and Holy Crap--I discovered that I had to be at ABC for auditions in an hour and a half! Cool beans, huh?

So I put on a clean shirt (the bluish-green one that shows off my dirt-brown eyes so nicely), and hopped on the subway.

This time, there were maybe 30 people there. It turns out that they're looking for contestants for both the regular show and for their special Movie Week shows. So I got to take a general trivia test and a movie trivia test.

If you've been hanging out here for any length of time, you may recall that in spite of working on movies and knowing a hell of a lot about how they're made (if I do say so myself), I'm not really good at movie trivia. I'm pretty sure I couldn't name any of the movies nominated for the last Academy Awards if you pointed a gun at my head. (Yes, I know that might be a stressful situation in which to come up with movie trivia, but I couldn't do it if you left out the gun and offered me a nice piece of choclolate for the answer either.)

Anyway, when you take the tests, there are 30 questions for each one and they give you one of those old style answer cards (please fill in the box completely with a number two pencil). The questionnaire comes in a manila envelope (please don't open your envelope until we say to), and -- here's the important part -- there's a random number written on the upper corner of the envelope. That number is your personal I.D. for the test. I was utterly distracted by the assumption that I'd forget my I.D. numbers (412 and 78 -- Ta Daaaaaa), and wouldn't get called for an interview even if I did well on either of the tests. (I managed to remember them.)

Well, we all take our tests and then they shove our answer cards into their UNIVAC and the UNIVAC spits out the ones who passed. And then they call out the I.D. numbers for those of us who passed. They called out a surprisingly small number of I.D. numbers.

And two of them were mine. I passed both tests! I have to admit that when one of the questions involves a maternal hamster and a father who smells of elderberries, the Gods must be smiling on me.

Anyway, I sat down for my interview. I tried my best to be engaging and energetic. I think they like that sort of thing. Certainly my previous attempt at channeling Marcel Marceau didn't impress anyone.

So now, I have to wait "two or three weeks" to receive a postcard telling me they want me on the show.

Or not. (Receiving a postcard, that is. I don't think they send you anything to notify you that you sucked and they don't want you anywhere near their studio again.)

Anyway, let's all keep our fingers crossed. If I get on, you can all root for me to be a big winner. Or, if you think it'd be more fun, A Beeg Weiner!

BTW, I don't know how far in advance they tape shows, but if I get on, I assume I'll be signing something promising not to talk about my appearance until after it airs. But we'll have a Super-Sekrit Code. If I announce that I've actually bought one of these things, you can assume I did pretty well. But let's keep that just between us, K?

September 12, 2011

2011-09-12T17:55:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, people gathered in lower Manhattan and Shanksville, PA and in Arlington, VA. Names were read. Tears were shed. Politicians, past and present, spoke and posed. The media watched and so did we. When the ceremonies ended the somber images were replaced with a couple of NFL games and a World Cup Rugby match between Ireland and the U.S.

That's probably as it should be.

I've mentioned that my grandfather served in World War I. I'd seen a picture of him in uniform, but I have no memory of ever having spoken with him about it. I'm sure it played a large part in molding the man he'd become, but it doesn't seem to have been the defining moment in his life. Other men didn't come home. Or they came home damaged in obvious or less visible ways.

Nearly 100 years later, I know the broad strokes of America's involvement in World War I and I know some details and dates, but with the exception of some reading I've done or some movies I've seen, World War I is no more real for me than Henry V at Agincourt. A cursory search of the internet will find you stories about High School students who can't identify which countries were allied with which.

For those who lived it, World War I was an occasion for heroism or glory. Or opportunism or barbarity. There was worry and pain, suffering and relief; mourning and celebration. For me, and probably for you, it's history. I'm pretty sure I can find a World War I memorial in practically every town in America, most of them fairly quaint; glorifying all things martial in the fashion of their time.

On December 7, 1941, The Empire of Japan executed a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, HI. To my way of thinking, nobody on the ground that day was a combatant. If America was at war already, nobody had told them. My father was 13 years old on that day, living in Florida. I have no memory of him ever speaking about his personal experience of those war years other than how they followed campaigns on maps. Logic tells me he must have known, or been aware of people who served and didn't come home. Or came home damaged in obvious or less visible ways.

For me, World War II is more real than World War I. Is it because it's more recent? Because there's so much surviving documentation? Because I grew up with movies telling the story from every imaginable angle? It's still history, but it's history I can process and experience on some level.

But once again, for those who lived it, whether at home or on the front, World War II was an occasion for heroism or glory. Or opportunism or barbarity. There was worry and pain, suffering and relief; mourning and celebration. In the aftermath, names were read. Tears were shed. Politicians spoke and posed. The media and the public paid attention.

Eventually, there were memorials. The U.S.S. Arizona lies visible below the surface of Pearl Harbor, a shrine to the sailors still entombed in her; still leaking oil into the surrounding water. A number of it's survivors have chosen to have their ashes interred there after death. I've never been there, but even reading about it is a deeply moving experience. I've never visited Auschwitz but I can't help thinking you'd have to be made of stone to see it and be unmoved.

It was only recently that the National World War II Memorial opened on The Mall in Washington DC. I recall a controversy when it was revealed that one of the construction firms building the memorial, (a company that had been founded in America in the early 20th century), had financial ties to a German company that had used slave labor during the war. Personally, I saw that as just one more tangible demonstration of how thoroughly America had won the war. Just a bit more than half a century after the end of WWII, Germany and Japan are two of our most important allies and trading partners.

A cursory search of the internet will find you stories about High School students who can't identify which countries were allied with which. And it's probably easier to spout Nazi propaganda in Topeka than it is in Munich. One of the peculiarities of our system is that you have a Constitutional right to be vile.

Regardless of whether you find that sad, or infuriating, or just pathetic, it's probably as it should be.

My experience of September 11, 2001 took place 2-1/2 miles from the World Trade Center. The smoke was visible from my rear window. The sounds and smells were present in my living room. I had walked through the Plaza at the World Trade Center three days earlier. The attacks took place within my personal geography. But I wasn't there any more than most of you were. In truth, my experience of September 11, 2001 was closer to that of someone watching events unfold from Chicago than it was to anyone who was there or was worrying about someone who was.

It's the height of unseemliness to try to assign varying degrees of victimhood or heroism on that day and the days that have followed, but the truth is, there are people who were in those buildings and on the planes that hit them and other people ran in trying to help afterward. There are people who jumped from those buildings when the alternative seemed worse and there are the people who can never forget being first hand witnesses. There are people who never managed to reach a loved one by phone and people who had the most harrowing last conversations I can imagine.

For months afterward, an army of volunteers and City and State and Federal employees worked the site -- first, looking for survivors, any survivors and then searching for remains. Many of them have catastrophic health problems and I'd be amazed if most weren't permanently traumatized by the experience to some degree or another.

Within a month of the attacks, the first U.S. Troops were on the ground in Afghanistan. A year and a half later, rightly or wrongly, there were troops in Iraq. Thousands will never come home. Others have come home damaged in obvious or in less visible ways. At present, there's no end in sight to the trauma for these people or the families they leave behind -- or come home to so fundamentally changed.

Today, on September 12, 2011, 9/11 is both history and a continuing trauma. There continue to be heroes and victims -- sometimes present in the same person. There will continue to be barbarism. There will continue to be opportunists of every stripe, not the least of them political. Eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, it will all be history. At least until the next crisis.

As a society, we'll fulfill our debt to many of those who acted on our behalf and we'll fail others. I hope history will look back and decide we made a good faith effort. But the War on Terrorism will eventually give way to some other conflict, be it hot or cold.

A hundred years from now, whatever shape mass media takes will have human interest stories on the last surviving child born to a 9/11 victim. A disappointing number of High School students will answer that the Khmer Rouge attacked the World Trade Center and that Shanksville, PA was a Civil War Battlefield where Teddy Roosevelt delivered some speech. They'll be convinced that the question about an attack on The Pentagon must be a trick question.

In the meantime, Ground Zero doesn't seem to exist anymore. It's been replaced by a well conceived and executed memorial. And every day it requires less imagination to see the completed new World Trade Center surrounding it.

This is as it should be.

Right now, to visit the site, you need a reservation and they seem to be booked solidly until late October. I plan to visit before the year ends. I'm pleased that they decided a traditional memorial combined with resurrecting a vibrant part of lower Manhattan was the right approach; was the right way to pay homage.

And I hope when I visit, there are children chasing each other through the trees with no idea they're anywhere other than a really pretty park.

That, too, is as it should be.
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Gothamist Photo Tour of the Memorial.

Science Fiction Movies Always Get It Wrong.

2011-09-10T11:22:00.001-04:00

You know how the aliens, or alien robots, or alien cyborg robots, or clones, or alien cyborg clone monster robots (or alien clone monster robot dogs with bees in their mouth so when they bark they shoot bees at their enemies), always show up and the first thing they say is, "Take me to your leaders."? How stupid is that? When I show up on some alien planet, I'm gonna say, "Take me to your followers"! Once I get those simps obeying me, the leaders won't be able to resist!

Bwahahahahaha!

With that in mind, I invite you to visit RoboHash to create your own awesome Robot Representative for when you decide to colonize the galaxy. When they shoot at your Robot Representative -- or chew on him or spit corrosive acid or whatever -- you'll still be sitting comfortably behind the scenes ready to execute Plan B. Here's the Representative they generated for me.

His genial appearance will surely lull my enemies into a false sense of security and then BAM!

Try A Little Cheesiness

2011-09-09T13:15:00.000-04:00

I don't think I'd ever heard the original version of Try a Little Tenderness until the other night when I went looking for it. Sample a few of these cheestastic examples and then listen in awe and wonder to what Otis Redding and co-arranger Isaac Hayes managed to turn it into.

First up, Ray Noble and his Orchestra with the 1932 recording of the original version. It's completely and utterly forgettable and the only miracle is that anyone else ever bothered to record the thing again.

Click forward to 1:05 if you want to skip most of the cloying instrumental lead-in. (I won't advise on how much of it you should listen to after that. You know your tolerances better than I do.)

But, for some reason, other big names couldn't resist this gem. Here's Mel Torme from some time in the '40's.

How about Bing Crosby? Bing could never resist taking a bit of saccharine and dumping in an additional heaping spoonful of sugar. And I suppose I'll always have a soft spot for Bing. Can't you just picture him crooning away while he beats the living shit out of one of his kids? (I was going to say they don't make singers like they used to, but apparently, Chris Brown has recorded the song too.)

I'll put you out of your misery. Here's the Otis Redding (and don't forget Isaac Hayes) version. The only reason the others shouldn't have their masters burned and all copies tracked down and destroyed is to demonstrate the genius of a couple of guys who could take such a piece of shit and turn it into a defining moment in music. I haven't got the first clue what gave them the idea to re-imagine the song this way, but I'm glad they did.

I wish I had more of an educated music vocabulary so I could expound a bit more on this. If you're like me, you've found yourself screaming this song in the car at some point in your life. And if you're like me, you've found yourself starting a phrase just a beat before or after Otis. The song has a completely simple melody and, at the same time, it's a highly complex bit of arrangement with constant shifts in tempo and pace.

And, just for the hell of it, here's Ducky...from before Charlie was dissing him.

Today is Badass Women Day on Polybloggimous.

2011-09-06T15:13:00.000-04:00

On June 17th, Brig. Gen. Lori Reynolds assumed command of U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Center, Parris Island. If I'm not mistaken, the Navy is opening up submarine duty to women. Women are serving in roles that, if not actually classified as combat, are only distinguished from combat by some really creative defining of the term. I don't think twice when I see a female NYPD Officer.* I've probably had almost as many women bosses as men. The fact of the matter is that nowadays, the thing that stands out most to me about these "milestones" for women is that I find myself surprised that they are milestones.

With that in mind, I ran across stories in the last few days about a couple of different extraordinary women. They'd be extraordinary in any era, but their achievements stand out all the more because of when they lived. But, bearing that in mind, ask yourself if you could have done the things they did. Yeah, I'm lookin' at you, you big macho dudes.**

First up, on August 31st, Betty Skelton died at the age of 85. At the age of 12, she took her first solo flight (illegally). At the age of 19, in 1946, she performed in her first aerobatics show at the same show where the the Navy's Blue Angels made their debut. Flying a Pitt Special biplane, one of her signature tricks was to cut a ribbon with the propeller -- while flying inverted 10' off the ground. The first time she attempted the trick, her plane stalled and she managed to right the plane and land on its wheels unscathed.

Twice, she set altitude records for light aircraft, reaching 29,050' in 1951 in a Piper Cub. It's worth noting that the temperature at that altitude was 53 below zero and she flew barefooted. She also got a P-51 Mustang up to 421 mph, which would have been a women's speed record, but she didn't get credit for it because she didn't land at the same field she took off from. Her engine exploded at her top speed and she couldn't bail out over Tampa Bay because she remembered, "I can't swim"; so she made a dead stick landing at a nearby Air Force base.

When she was finished with her aerobatics career, she started in on a couple of other careers. In 1954, she became the first woman test driver for the auto industry. This led to her being an Ad Exec on the Corvette account. In 1957, she was the first woman pace car driver at the Indy 500. Throughout the 50's she set a number of speed and acceleration records at Daytona and the Bonneville Salt Flats. She set records for driving from NY to Los Angeles and also across South America from Buenos Aires to Chile.

Early in the Space Program, there was an school of thought that said women, due to smaller size and weight, might be better candidates for NASA's Astronaut Program. Betty Skelton took -- and passed -- exactly the same battery of tests administered to the original Mercury Astronauts. She appeared on the Feb. 2, 1960 cover of Look Magazine wearing a spacesuit with the inside story headlined, “Should a Girl Be First in Space?”

Skelton set her final major land-speed record in 1965, when she topped 315 mph during one run at Bonneville, driving a jet-powered car and wearing no more protective gear than an open-faced helmet and a windbreaker.

Our second badass woman is Nellie Granger. Nellie was part of the 2nd Class to qualify as Stewardesses for Transcontinental & Western Airways. She was a registered nurse. She was 22 years old, weighed 110 lbs. and stood 5'2" tall -- all within the narrow parameters required to have been considered for training in the first place.

On April 7, 1936, she was the lone Air Hostess on TWA Flight 1, a DC-2 "Sun Racer" traveling from Newark, NJ to Los Angeles with nearly a dozen stops in between. Headed toward their 2nd stop in Pittsburgh, the pilot flew into low clouds over the Alleghenies and crashed near Uniontown, PA. (An investigation confirmed that radio beacons were functioning properly and judged the crash to be caused by pilot error.)

The pilot, co-pilot and nine of the 11 passengers were killed in the crash. Granger was thrown clear of the wreckage and when she came to, approximately 125' from the plane, she went back into the flaming fuselage and dragged out the two survivors, Mrs. Meyer Ellenstein, (wife of Newark's Mayor), and Charles Challinor. Both were severely injured and while Mrs. Ellenstein would recover, Mr. Challinor died the following week from infections that set in.

The crash site was near a mountain top and roughly 4 miles from the nearest road - a fact that Nellie Granger wasn't aware of. After dragging the two survivors from the plane, she managed to locate a telephone line and followed it 11 miles cross-country through sleet and snow until she reached the first place she could report the crash. Allegheny County Airport was aware that the plane was missing, but no one knew of the crash until she reached a telephone nearly 4 hours after the crash.

After reporting in, she rode back with a neighbor to lead ambulances to the crash site -- once again, 4 miles from the nearest road.

The stories I got this from contradict each other on some of the details, but I've pieced it together as best I could. Other than stating that she returned to her job with TWA with a promotion, I can't find anything else about what became of Nellie Granger later in life or how long she lived.

Here are a few links worth reading:

A Time Magazine story from April 20, 1936.
A blog post on Props, Pistons, Old Jets and the Good Ole Days of Flying, created from a number of contemporaneous sources.

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*FDNY is another story. From the most recent statistics I can find (September 2010), only 32 of 11,500 NY firefighters are women. And frankly, I don't buy the whole "upper body strength" argument. This too shall change.

**You may take that challenge with a grain of salt since I happen to know that most of the men who read this "are not now, nor have they ever been" big macho dudes.

What The Hell Is Going On Here?

2011-09-02T16:38:00.000-04:00

For some odd reason, the world seems to be suddenly obsessed with finding out about "check". What kind of check? I don't know. But they're asking Google about it and Google is sending them all to me for the answer.

Here's a screenshot of the search phrases for the last 40 visitors to Polybloggimous (You'll have to biggify it to read it.) You can ignore the search for "Wrongnumber cock". I am.

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Just so you know that isn't some GoogleBot or other nefarious thingie, here's the locations those searches originated from:

They're from all over the place!

And this has been going on for days now. Not that I'm really complaining, but my daily visits have almost doubled...and all because people are being sent to read this post. I wonder if they're pleased with the results.

At any rate, does anyone out there have any idea what the sudden worldwide interest in "check" is?

Thursday Photo Challenge (Or Whatever Did We Do To Deserve Two Posts In One Day?)

2011-09-01T15:41:00.001-04:00

This week, Michelle has declared a Yellow Submarine Edition to the Thursday Photo Scavenger Hunt. It's surprising just how much yellow stuff you can find once you're looking for it. And I'll admit that I'm recycling one picture...but I couldn't resist. It's perfect and it's yellow!

So, without further ado...

Yellow Flower

Yellow Vehicle

Something Else Yellow

Summer Water:

Dusty:

Exhaustion:

Edited to add...LuLu is exhausted from holding the window open.

Goy Gevalt!

2011-09-01T13:23:00.000-04:00

OK, I can't figure this one out.

A couple of days ago, the NY Post ran a story by Josh Margolin; 'Jewish' Bachmann is costing Romney. In short, (if you can't be bothered to read the already short Post article), there's a supposed tizzy because orthodox Jews are donating to Bachmann's campaign in the mistaken impression that she's Jewish. As Eric Wemple points out in the Washington Post, every other story, report and blog post on the subject, refers back to the NY Post story as its source and the NY Post story is, to put it mildly, light on attribution.

A little anecdotal background first - and you can translate "anecdotal" to mean "Nathan's gonna pull info out of his ass instead of citing any actual facts": In spite of the (correct) perception that Jews generally support liberal candidates, Ultra Orthodox Jews tend to vote Ultra Conservative. I don't mean to generalize - (and you can translate that to mean "Nathan's about to generalize for all he's worth") - Hassids are to Judaism as Evangelicals are to Christianity. They believe they are the exclusive recipients of the real Word of God and everyone else, other Hassidic sects included, are blasphemous heretics.* The major difference, as far as I can tell, is that Evangelicals feel compelled to recruit everyone else to their beliefs in the hope of saving them, and Hassids don't give a rat's ass if everything you believe is wrong as long as you leave them alone.

But while I may disagree with Hassids on - uh - basically everything, I don't think they're stupid. Hassids purposely keep to themselves as a community, but they don't live under a rock. The idea that they might think Bachmann is Jewish because of a vaguely Jewish sounding name is, well, almost as batshit crazy as Bachmann is. The more likely scenario is that if anyone (attributable, at least), were claiming she was Jewish, Hassids would be falling all over themselves to prove she isn't. (You may have to scroll down on that link. There's a humongous ad at the top of the page.) But it's not like she's been shy about her religious affiliation. If she could, she'd be trotting out the results of Jesus' most recent colonoscopy -- that she administered personally.

Just for the hell of it, here are some other people whose names could be perceived as Jewish -- if you're a fucking idiot:

Gottlob Berger, Werner von Blomberg, Martin Bormann, Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Esser, Hans Frank, (he was one of Anne's uncles, wasn't he?), Kurt Gerstein, Karl Kaufmann, Ilse Koch, Arthur Liebehenschel, and Alfred Rosenberg. Yeah, the inclusion of a -berg, -mann, or -stein makes someone a Jew! No-brainer, right?

Which all leads me to the conclusion that someone, somewhere, thinks this helps someone or hurts someone else. I just can't figure out who. Is it supposed to somehow tarnish Bachmann's rep among Evangelicals by tarring her as a Hebe? Yeah, I don't see that gaining much traction. Is it supposed to plant the idea that she's Jewish and gin up** support? Again, unlikely. Her stated support of Israel is a better selling point to that target audience and it actually exists.

I'm way too naive to figure out what this little contretemps intends to achieve, so I'm hoping you guys can explain it to me. Conspiracy theorist (and this is a one time offer), are most welcome to chime in. This one has to be Byzantine as hell in its logic.

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*Disclaimer: When I worked on this movie a couple of years ago, I knew I'd have more direct dealings with the Hassidic community than I'd ever had before and while I didn't expect them to embrace the movie I also didn't expect them to have any great objection to it; it's a fairly light bit of fluff. And I was right in that assumption, at least in one community. I met with somebody as far up the food chain as you can get within one of the major sects and the gist of his reaction was that the movie got a couple of things wrong but it wasn't particularly offensive. If we made changes, his community would cooperate actively; if not, they wouldn't stand in our way, but they wouldn't help. Since most directors don't even like the people footing the bills butting in with suggestions, we said "Thanks, but no thanks".

The thing that surprised me was that I kinda expected to come away with a better understanding of Hassids. I figured I'd experience a bit of "to know them is to love them". Instead, without going into detail, I'd have to say that familiarity bred contempt. Let's just say I didn't discover some deep seated sense of kinship and we'll leave it at that.

**As sometimes happens, I just found myself using a word or phrase that I'm totally familiar with, but found myself thinking "Where the hell does that one come from"? So I looked it up thinking I'd find that it came from some meaning of creating with an "engine" (as in cotton gin). Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it comes from "ginger up" implying a way to "spice up" or "excite" -- the cited usage being a prohibition against putting "...ginger up a horse's fundament..." as a means of making it appear more lively to a prospective buyer. Ain't etymology wonderful?

Widget The Hut.

2011-08-31T00:20:00.000-04:00

Slumming in the Kitty Condo.

Irene Aftermath: Good News, Bad News Edition.

2011-08-30T11:34:00.000-04:00

Dear Sir,

I regret to inform you that the hurricane has caused a tree to fall across the hood of your car. The good news, however, is that the tree fell so gently that it is just leaning there and doesn't seem to have caused the slightest of imperfections to your automobile.

Dear Sir,

I am pleased to inform you that the city has come by and removed the tree from your vehicle. I regret, however to inform you that the removal of said tree from your car caused considerably more damage than the falling of the aforementioned tree.

Have a nice day.

Sincerely,

The City.

Note: I didn't have my camera with me yesterday when I walked by this car, but the tree looked like it had been gently laid down across the car and there wasn't a mark on it. I went to get some pictures this morning and found that the process of removing the tree had fucked up the car considerably.

Polybloggimous Invites You To Try Your Hand At Talmudic Scholoarship.

2011-08-29T11:56:00.000-04:00

One of the most common themes in both the Old and the New Testament is that we're all puny humans and God's will is unknowable. He's the big guy and it's impossible for us to conceive the BIG PICTURE.

For some odd reason, there's no shortage of people who are willing, nay, eager to tell you God's purpose every time something bad happens. Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell are (were) sure that earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and everything else are the fault of America for tolerating gays. This seems to be the rule regardless of where these cataclysms occur...Americans' tolerate gays, so Haiti gets flattened.

Glen Beck is on record pronouncing why bad things happen to good people. Or bad people...I'm not sure. He's a bit unknowable too.

The Westboro douchebags are a bit more specific. Americans tolerate gays and Jews (and Vegans?), so God kills American soldiers.

Thanks to Deus Ex Malcontent, it's been brought to my attention that Michele Bachmann thinks God is really concerned with American political parties. Over the weekend, she had this to say:

"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He (God) said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending."

I'm more comfortable with the Talmudic tradition which basically had a bunch of guys arguing about the meaning of anything and everything. They kinda took that whole "unknowable" thing as a prime directive and then assumed that every question of God's purpose had myriad possible answers. Let me give you an example. Let's say they wanted to figure out the Biblically correct response to a situation; first they'd lay out all of the details:

If a non-Jew eats a Double-Double with extra cheese and mayonnaise from In-n-Out Burger while plowing his field and he drops a portion of his lunch in his field and a mouse comes along and eats the dropped portion of his lunch and the mouse is eaten by a hawk before the mouse's meal has been digested and then the hawk flies into your wheat field and dies of old age before it has digested the mouse with the undigested Double-Double with extra cheese and mayonnaise and lies undiscovered in your wheat field, will the milk from the cow you bought from your Uncle Menachem still be kosher?

Talmudic study is big on specificity. The answer, by the way is that Uncle Menachem is a well-known gonif, and why would you buy a cow from him.

No, actually, if there were 12 Rabbis discussing the question there would be a different answer for each of the Rabbis and one of them would be really open minded and he'd argue 3 sides of the issue. This is as it should be.

If we're going to try to divine God's purpose in sending earthquakes and hurricanes and forest fires and droughts and Kim Kardashian to us, I'd like to suggest that we widen the net when looking for answers. For example, the most obvious response to Michele Bachmann's assertion is that maybe God wants her to shut up and God thinks the Tea Party are a bunch of silly prats who might have been amusing for a little while, but the joke has gone stale and they should crawl back under their rocks and leave us all alone.

Edited to add this aside: It's been suggested that if the hurricane was really a punishment sent by God, it would have turned left up the St. Lawrence Seaway and continued until it got the Minnesota's 6th Congressional District. Michelle is their fault, after all.

But even that explanation shows more than a bit of chutzpah. It is a bit USA-centric, n'est pas? Who are we to say that God isn't rooting for the Chinese and He wants our economy to tank so Asia can take its rightful place in the world order?

And that possibility is obnoxiously Earth-centric. Maybe there's another planet out there and God's decided their population is better than we are and he's preparing the Earth for an alien invasion. Maybe these phenomena are just holy terraforming for a race of beings who prefer a watery rubble-filled landscape!

Maybe God uses a cannon when dealing with mosquitoes and that whole hurricane was solely for the purpose of flooding Merlin Lowery's basement in Parsippany!

The explanations are endless! Let's hear yours.

The Eye of the Sturm: A Continuation of Irresponsible and Lackluster Irene Reportage

2011-08-28T10:33:00.003-04:00

So we went to bed around 4:00 a.m. and got up about 45 minutes ago. I, of course, as the dedicated reporter I am, walked all the way outside (after having my first coffee), and ventured all of 100 yards from my front door. The things I do for you.

As near as I can tell, we're in the eye of what's left of Irene. It's been downgraded to a Tropical Storm with 60 mph winds. The news guys are out desperately looking for flooding over their ankles. (OK, I did just see a shot from somewhere out on Long Island with a largish boat floating down a street near a church.)

Here? Not so much.

However, there is one bit of devastation I must report to you. Y'know that picture I've been using for a while now for my banner? Here, I'll put it up again, so it stays on this post after the banner changes eventually.

Well the background for that is a plywood construction wall around a church down the block from me. And it's a little bit of a goner.

That green is the color it really is. It' brown on my banner because I own a computer and I'm an Ahtist.

Truth be told, a few months ago we had a wind storm and the whole thing blew down in that one, so Irene's a bit of a fizzle. At least on my block.

As you may have noted in the first of those two pictures, the front door of the church is wide open. Come back a little later for some interior shots. I risked my life for you people!

Update 11:00 a.m. Argggghhhhh! THE SUN IS OUT! IT BURNS! IT BURNS, MY PRECIOUS!
(Actually, it's kinda nice to see, but how fun is that to say?)

Update 11:12 a.m. We pause now for a brief impression of Hurricane Irene (disguised as a knight on a castle wall).

Apropos of nothing, here's the inside of that church. There were about 10 people wandering around taking pictures.

Polybloggimous: Your Home Of The Most Incomplete Hurricane Irene Tracking Anywhere.

2011-08-27T13:25:00.012-04:00

Hurricane Irene is barreling up the East Coast on it's way to visit Polybloggimousville. As a public service, I intend to keep you all up to date as the storm approaches and let you know how we fare here in Brooklyn. I'll also offer helpful advice.

First advice: If you're in an evacuation area, please leave if you haven't already. Please make sure you take your pets with you. Please make sure the kids know where the fuse boxes are and how to operate your sump pump. Assure them that you'll keep in touch as long as cell service is still up.

Here's a screenshot of the evacuation zones including my enviably safe position in it. With the help of GoogleEarth, I was able to establish that we live 31' above the East River so we should be good with any storm surge. Let this be a lesson to any of you who invested in backyard bomb shelters. Next time, instead of going underground, build a bomb tree house.

It's currently almost 1:30pm and I've given up paying attention to what time they say the worst of the storm is going to get here. It was supposed to be around Midnight tonight, but now I think they're saying it'll be more like 7:00am tomorrow. I'll know when it gets all windy and stuff.

Right now it's dead calm and eerily quiet. It's raining a bit. It's a comfortable 73º with 422% humidity. The cats are confused. They're doing they're usual whining for dinner 5 hours early.

I'll update you all later when stuff starts to happen. Before that, I'll update you as stuff continues not to happen yet.

P.S. If anybody is worried, we're well stocked here. Plenty of Milk Duds and Cheetos. The crunchy kind...not the abominable puffy ones.

Update 2:30 p.m. Still no weather to speak of, but the potential misery is taking root. If we lose power, it's not just losing food in the fridge and reading by candle light. We'd also lose WiFi and Netflix!

The horror! (Pray for us.)

Update 2:46 p.m. Various middle eastern websites are quoting Al-Queda sources as claiming credit for Hurricane Irene and the "impending doom of Coney Island and all of those infidel hot dogs". Several candidates in the Republican Presidential Primaries were quick to blame President Obama for antagonizing Al-Queda by "killing their number 2 man over and over and over again". A White House insider, speaking on condition of anonymity said, "Get real. Hot Dogs are German in origin. I have no idea why anybody thinks they're so all-fired American. And have you been to Coney Island? What a dump! Mom and Apple Pie are safely ensconced in an undisclosed location."

Update 4:00 p.m. Mayor Bloomberg and NYPD officials are reaching out to New York's bondage community requesting the loan of some specialized equipment. "Many of our officers will need to remain deployed throughout the worst of the storm and we hope to lash them securely to various stationary objects at strategic locations."

It's thought that some enthusiasts were eager to provide assistance, but they were tied up with other things at the time and couldn't respond.

Update 5:55 p.m. Just received a text from Irene. "Stl on t way thr. Hld up a bit n VA. C U l8tr dude."
I don't know about you but I appreciate it when expected guests let you know they're running late. A very considerate storm, she is.

In other news, our lack of self control means we may work our way through all of our snacks before the storm even gets here. By Midnight, we'll probably be fighting over those nasty puffed rice cakes. The Lord of the Flies will be playing out in Brooklyn. So sad.

Update 6:34 p.m. Undeniable evidence of the Apocalypse: We've just ordered a pizza from Domino's.
Edited to add: I have to admit I like ordering a pizza online and I like the "pizza tracker" even more! But I just noticed the tracker page offers you the opportunity to "Leave a note of encouragement to the team making your order". As you'll see from the screenshot below, "Get it right this time, you numskulls" isn't an option.

Click to biggify!

Update 9:30 p.m. Guess what? It's been raining a little bit. ARRRRGGGGHHHHHH! (Sorry if that bit of panic was unseemly.)

Domino's showed up just on time. The delivery guy called me from his car out front four times. I had the ringer turned down and I didn't notice. Then he rang the bell. He seemed very annoyed with me that I hadn't answered the phone. Maybe he expected me to come out to his car for my pizza?

Update 10:10 p.m. THUNDER! Otherwise, just a continuation of Drizzle-geddon so far.

Update: 10:30 p.m. Seems like some heavyish rain is arriving. And they've just announced that the 5 buroughs are under a tornado watch until 5:00 a.m. Oh, Joy!

Update: 10:45 p.m. Knock, knock...is this thing on? I know you're out there. I can hear you breathing. Actually, a bunch of people are visiting today but you're not talking. You may recall I'm a comment-whore.

In honor of my impending doom, you're invited to tell me the stupidest thing you've ever done in really crappy weather.

Update: 8/28, 12:40 a.m. Here it cooooomes! (That's meant to be read like the little girl in Poltergeist saying, "They're baaaaack". I'm not sure I spelled the inflection right.)

It's been pissing rain for a little while now and the wind is starting to kick up impressively. Considering they've said we won't see the heavy stuff until about 7:00 a.m., this could get exciting.

Update: 2:53 a.m. Channel 2 is in my neighborhood doing some live coverage. They just reported a blown (or knocked) over trash can. I repeat...live coverage of a trash can on it's side sitting in the curb lane of Atlantic Avenue. Also, the banners outside of P.C. Richard are moving in the wind. MOVING!

I'll be going to bed soon.

Meteorologically Challenged During Thursday Photo Challenge

2011-08-25T18:38:00.000-04:00

Today, we had a little preview of Hurricane Irene; some unnamed storm Canada sent our way. Suffice it to say I didn't feel like spending a lot of time wandering around while the sky loured and pissed looking for shit to shoot pictures of (he ended prepositionally - and then not!)

But I did have to go to Walgreen's, so I took my camera with me! Here's what I shot:

Shopping:

Bell:

Book:

Writing:

Learning:

I totally missed the Bus. Sorry.

I'm also thinking I may take it as a challenge to shoot future photo challenges all in some store I happen to be going to anyway. I may not, but who knows. It'd be lazy of me, but dull for you!

Stuff About Stuff Nathan Reads...And Stuff.

2011-08-21T12:33:00.002-04:00

Item the first:

Fellow UCFer Kate Baker has won herself a Hugo Award for her work at Clarkesworld! I get zero credit for making this happen even in my wildest imagination and/or most delusional fantasies. I do, however, deem this most excellent and choose to feel a little ray of shininess radiating down from Connecticut. Way to go Kate! Double-Triple-Special w00ters!*

Item the second:

Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians and The Magician King, was awarded the Hugo for Best New Professional science fiction or fantasy writer of 2009 or 2010. I also get zero credit for making this happen, but in my wildest imagination and my most delusional fantasies, I will choose to believe that my praise of his books may have influenced the judges. Hey! It's possible! It's my blog and I'll humor myself whether you or anybody else chooses to join me!

Item the second and a 1/2th:

I went to the release party for The Magician King which happened at a little independent bookstore in Greenpoint (Brooklyn). I managed to misread what time the thing was starting and I guess I was 1/2-hour late, so I basically missed everything but the opportunity to stand in a (really) long line to get my book autographed and to say "hi" to the author. I declined. Hey Lev...If you agree with my assessment in "Item the second" (above), and want to come over to my neighborhood to sign my book, I'll buy you a beer or two around the corner! It's only a couple of subway stops away (I think) and you can't beat an offer of free beer, can you? (Don't answer that. Let my delusions enjoy themselves for a while.)

Item the third:

At the same time as I was discovering Lev Grossman, I was also discovering Randolph LaLonde and his Spinward Fringe Series. And it took a comment from from timb111 to make me grok the series-ness of the series. And now I've gotten back to it and continued where I left off. These are all self-published books, available as ebooks for $2.99 each. I'm reading #4 right now.

The series is a continuing Space Opera. It's not heavy reading, but they're imaginative and entertaining reads. They have one of the drawbacks of self-published works (they could use a bit more editor attention, evident in typos, etc.), but that's mostly a quibble in this context.

I have one other quibble. Part of the copyright page reads,

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

I honestly understand he's trying to be as tactful as possible here. I also realize that self-publishing ebooks at such a drastically reduced price is still a relatively new business model and people are understandably feeling their way around the landscape. Having said all that, I'm so accustomed to the model where I buy a book and then it's mine to do with as I wish, that this comes off a bit heavy handed. Granted, it's not like I'm planning to go down to Ye Olde Used Ebook Store" to try to get back 50¢ of my investment, nor am I the type of person who'd even think about putting anyone's books online for anyone to get without paying the author, but if I feel like handing my nook to a friend and saying, "Read this. You'll enjoy it.", I'm probably going to do it. Just sayin'.

I'd be interested in other opinions on this. Kindly, chime in.
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*"w00t" has just been included in the Oxford English Dictionary, but they're spelling it with "o's" instead of zeros. This strikes me as rwong, and I believe there should be a massive shitstorm visited upon their door for the error!

Departmental Detritus.

2011-08-20T14:28:00.000-04:00

The other day, A.J. had a brief post about the crap she inadvertently collects working as a film electrician. Which got me thinking about some of the useless shit in my kit.

Yes, I need lots of signs so people will know where the restrooms are and how to get to catering. I can't remember the last time anybody wanted to know where the payphones were.

I have a ridiculous number of dried up Sharpies, hi-lighters and Magnum markers.

I shoot everything digital now and post the files online so I can't imagine why I still have 20 of these in my kit.

I have about 50 maps and map-books. And, of course, I have to make a map to attach to every call sheet. And, of course, everybody just plugs the location address into their phone and let's it tell them how to get there. My map of Albuquerque comes in handy all the time. Not.

I used to have a 1-million footcandle deerlight you could plug into the cigarette lighter in the car. That was really handy on those mornings I showed up in the dark before anyone else. Somebody else liked it a bunch and stole it a while back.

I'm not entirely sure why I ever thought it was important to have a bunch of phone line in my kit but I doubt I'm ever going to need this again. I've got three unopened packages.

I'd be really happy if the toilet plunger in my kit became obsolete.

Last, but not least, I've never needed these yet, but I'm hanging on to them just in case.

You Too Can Be A Programming Prodigy.

2011-08-16T14:39:00.001-04:00

I've decided I must know as much about programming daytime television as the people who currently make those decisions. Not that I honestly care all that much about the issue, but something caught my attention recently. The saga begins with ABC deciding to cancel two of their long-running ~~Soap Operas~~ Daytime Dramas. I'm guessing that the cast-of-millions must have been the big expense with those shows since they obviously weren't throwing gobs of money at things like production value or scripts.

You may ask, "Nathan, just why is it that you are so familiar with All My Children and One Life to Live"? Well, that's a two part answer. The first part of the answer is that I happened to be home sick a bunch in 1970. I may have just not wanted to go to school, but Mom bought it. Regardless, I was on the couch being nursed to health during the debut season of All My Children and I vaguely remember watching it. Because of the glacial pace of some Daytime Drama storylines, there are some subplots begun that season that have yet to be resolved. You can miss a ton of episodes without missing much. The second part of the answer is that Anon GF and I are both freelancers. There are days when both of us are home and when Anon GF is here, she likes to catch up on those two shows*. I don't pay all that much attention**. Frankly, the two shows just run together in my mind -- I'm never sure which one is on; whether one has ended and the next one begun (unless Susan Lucci is on - even I know which one she's on). And with the way characters get married/divorced, murdered/resurrected, born/cloned, etc., it really doesn't mess with the viewing experience all that much to just blend the two into one nonsensical melange.

I don't know what ABC is filling the second hour with, but one show they've announced is The Chew.

It's a Foodie show starring these people...

...and Mario Batali. who will, presumably, wear shorts and orange, plastic shoes!

I suppose all of this is my way of saying that the only potential audience-attracting feature The Chew has is that it rhymes with The View!

With that in mind, I have a few suggestions for what ABC can schedule to fill their second open slot. Heck, I'm pretty sure they could just fill their entire daytime schedule with stuff like The Zoo, The Queue, and The Pew. I haven't taken the time to imagine what those shows would actually be about, but here are some ideas I've fleshed out a bit more.

How about this one?

The Hugh! An exciting new panel discussion starring Hugh Grant, Hugh Jackman, Hugh Hefner and Hugh Laurie! The four of them probably won't get along very well, so this show promises conflict out the wazoo! And if Jackman gets really pissed off, he may just go all Wolverine on his panel-mates!

Or maybe...

The Jew will be an edgy update of What's My Line, in which a panel of C-list celebrities will try to pick the one real Jew out of a group including two impostors. I'm almost certain Arlene Francis would be happy to rise from the grave to appear. And there's apparently some question about whether or not she was Jewish, so she could be a panelist or a contestant! Win-win!

Last, but not least, The Loo will follow the adventures of a quirky Englishman roaming the rural South in his fruitless search for a toilet.

These are sure-fire hits and ABC, you're welcome to them for a nominal fee. Have your girl call my girl.***

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*It probably won't improve your opinion of me to know that when I get to choose the daytime viewing, I opt for the channel that can only afford to show crappy movies like How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, The Beast of Yucca Flats, and Mannequin Two: On the Move.

**In both of our defenses, neither of us really pays much attention to whatever might be on. We're both the type who kinda like the TV on in the background whether we're watching it or not. Sue us.

***Maybe send me an email first to warn me that you'll be calling so I can line up a girl to answer the phone. Thanks!

It's Great To Be With A Weiner!

2011-08-14T17:48:00.001-04:00

This will be a brief two-part entry. The first part came from my search for the perfect headline for the second part. I may have failed...but that's what it's all about.

One of the first jobs I ever had as a P.A. was on a commercial for some hot dogs starring Luis Tiant. My memory tells me it was a commercial for Fenway Franks...but that's got to be wrong (continuing the theme) because by the time I worked on this commercial, Luis Tiant would have been playing for the Yankees and not the Red Sox anymore. I doubt Fenway Franks ever asked anyone on the Yankees to pitch their product. So maybe it was for Ballpark Franks...or somebody.

The whole point of the commercial was to have Tiant saying "It's great to be with a winner", but because of his accent, it would come out "It's great to be with a wiener". But he couldn't pronounce "weiner" and kept saying "winner". I think we shot 90 takes before they gave up and decided that "winner" would work just fine.

Tact and giving up seemed to be the two best strategies for telling Luis Tiant he was fucking up.

The other thing I want to bring to your attention is the transcript of an ACTUAL CONVERSATION that took place in my house just a little while ago. Here's the thing. We don't go in for those candy-assed "participation awards" they give out to every kid who shows up for a game.

Nope. We believe in winners and losers. The following takes place while I'm playing a game on my computer which has been stymying me every damned time.

Me: Hey honey, I made it to level 11.
Anon GF: How'd that happen.
Me: ::Blank Stare::
Anon GF: Well, you're not that good at it.

Encouragement: Pass It On!

Thursday Rolls Around And Around And Around...

2011-08-12T16:23:00.001-04:00

I haven't posted last week's Thursday Photo Challenge pics, much less this week's. So here are two weeks worth of Thursdays...all on one Friday. Happy now Michelle?

Weather:

Window:

Rock:

Glasses (I satisfied the requirement for the kind you drink from, but fell down on the job for the kind you look through.)

Grass:

Fungi

Summer Fruit:

Lazy

(The "lazy" applies to me. These guys were doing an animation of a wall being graffitied and I was too lazy to stick around beyond the first splotch of white paint.)

Something that makes you think of Calvin & Hobbes:

And there you have it!

It was Michelle's Idea AND Her Fault!

2011-08-12T11:12:00.000-04:00

In case you missed it, NPR did a poll and decreed that the following books are the all time bestest books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. And Random Michelle decided it might be a good idea to tell the world which of them she had read and Janiece declared it a meme. Well, I'm nothing if not suggestible, so I shall obey the meme.

bold means I’ve read it.

Michelle also had a category in italics for books/series she'd started and abandoned. I'm not going to get that specific. If I have a distinct memory of reading most of a series, but maybe I never finished it, I'm going to count it in my read column. And if I run across one of the few books I've hated enough to consciously toss it aside, I'll mention that. I'm also not going to separate out personal favorites cuz I don't feel like it.

1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien

2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
3. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
5. A Song Of Ice And Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin - I read a bunch of these, but I'm not sure I finished them.

6. 1984, by George Orwell
7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman There's a discussion of this one going on elsewhere regarding the book vs. the movie. Lots of people seem to prefer (by a wide margin), the movie. I loved both and I've never found anything depressing about the book. Ah well.
12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan. I'm sure I haven't read all of the most recent entries, but I devoted a lot of time to this series and I'm saying I've read it.
13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss- I own it, does that count?
19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
22. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
23. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood -In the same discussion as "The Princess Bride", there's a lot of "I know why it's good, but I didn't like it." I hated this book. Nuf sed.
24. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King I know I ran out of team on this one eventually. Don't remember exactly where.
25. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
26. The Stand, by Stephen King
27. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
28. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
29. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
30. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman
31. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
32. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams - Meh. Did not love it.
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
34. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
37. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne
38. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys
39. The War Of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells
40. The Chronicles Of Amber, by Roger Zelazny
41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings
42. The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson
44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven.
45. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien I may have been obsessed to have made it through this one.
47. The Once And Future King, by T.H. White
48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
49. Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke
50. Contact, by Carl Sagan
51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons
52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
54. World War Z, by Max Brooks
55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett I'm not sure how they chose just a few of the Discworld books. I've read every friggin' one of 'em.
58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant
59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
61. The Mote In God’s Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
62. The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist
67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks
68. The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard
69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
70. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
71. The Way Of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
72. A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne
73. The Legend Of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore
74. Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
77. The Kushiel’s Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey
78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
81. The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson
82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks
84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart
85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher
87. The Book Of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn
89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldan The first was, by far, the strongest. I don't regret reading any of the other books in the series, but some of them fall flat.
90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock
91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
93. A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge
94. The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson
96. Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
98. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville
99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony
100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis

So, HOLY CRAP! I've read exactly 50% of these. In spite of the fact that I read a lot of SciFi/Fantasy, I didn't expect to have read quite that many. High Fives to me!

Step One is Admitting You Have A Problem.

2011-08-09T11:45:00.000-04:00

I have two new internet addictions. First, there's The Crickler. It's kinda like a crossword puzzle -- only not. The one I linked is already solved 'cause the internet won't let me show you a blank one, but -- whatever. Anyway, this one is fine because you can only get one per day; how bad could that be.

I've also become enamored of Jigidi.com. This one has online jigsaw puzzles and I'm totally freakin hooked. So what did the rat bastards do to me this morning?

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!

Summer Reading Reminder.

2011-08-08T10:39:00.000-04:00

You only have ONE WEEK LEFT to take part in Todd Wheeler's Summer Reading Program. I'll admit I haven't read a ton of books this summer, but you can help make Todd pay through the nose. Get on over there and tell him what you've read.

Janiece's Officially Authorized Copycat Summer Reading Program continues until September 6th, so you've got a bit more time to extend her generosity. And you don't need to have read the book twice to enter both! Such a deal!

Don't Be Silly. Of Course Things Could Be Worse. (Updated Because - Something Got Worse!)

2011-08-08T03:03:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, my pal Jim posted a video on FaceBook of Bobby McFerrin singing Don't Worry. Be Happy. He captioned it, "Relax. I'm pretty sure it couldn't get any worse. Right?"

I took this as something of a challenge. Or to be more accurate, I took it as Schmuck Bait:

Jim's not usually such a silly optimist, so I felt the need to correct his misconception of real life. Below, you'll find a simple 8-question test. For each question, choose the response with the worst possible outcome. Some questions will have more than one "correct" response. Immediately after answering each question, you'll be shown the correct response(s) and an explanation.

Note: The embedding may be a little wonky (See what I mean about things not working out?) You don't need to fill in your real name, but you need to put some name in the box. And if you're not able to take the quiz right here on the blog, the "view on ProProfs.com" link will take you to a working version of the test.

And remember, the fact that things can get worse is actually a good thing.

Update: So I thought I really liked this Quiz Creating Site because it let's you ask questions in a number of ways and you can do neat formatting stuff. Most sites that have a "Free" trial either let you play with it for a set period of time, or let you create a set (limited) number of quizzes (or whatever). This one keeps all of the results of you guys taking the test, but as soon as five of you had taken the quiz, I started getting emails from them telling me that they only store the first ten results and "Don't you want to upgrade to a paid account now so we'll store bazzillions for you?" Well, no...I don't. I don't really create all that many quizzes. I've gotten 3 emails from them so far. That counts as worse.

Of Course It Could Be Worse. Let Us Count The ways. » create exams

The Magician King: Here There Be Monsters.

2011-08-06T10:06:00.000-04:00

Let's suppose you got your invitation to attend Hogwarts and learn magic. But let's suppose when you fell off your Quidditch broom, the professors couldn't just put you back together again with a potion..or maybe they just couldn't be bothered. Because Brakebill's ain't Hogwarts and you'd do well to get that into your pointy little head rather quickly. Sure, you'll come out of it a qualified magician, but some of your classmates will fall along the way -- some in rather horrible and sanguinary ways.

Let's further suppose that after you graduate, you and a few of your classmates decide to skibble off to Narnia. Only Aslan isn't a good and cuddly Lion always there when you need rescuing; teaching you to be honorable Monarchs. Because Narnia may be out there somewhere but you've landed in Fillory. Instead of Aslan, you'll get Ember, a somewhat taciturn ram. He shows up when he feels like it. He hands out assignments. His reasons are his own and who the hell are you to ask, "What's in it for me?"

Lev Grossman's The Magician King continues the story begun in The Magicians and pretty much picks things up right where we left off. Quentin and his friends have been installed as Fillory's four monarchs and they're leading a charmed, indolent life. But things in their magic kingdom start behaving in ways they're not supposed to. Little glitches keep popping up.

Quentin volunteers to go off on a small tax collecting mission and soon finds himself with more mission than he signed up for. By the time he realizes he might have preferred the quiet life, his choices have narrowed considerably. Quentin's story intercuts with flashbacks to Julia's experience picking up magic in a series of safe houses after not being accepted to Brakebill's. She doesn't get the official sanctioned version of magic; she gets the underground version found in the school of hard knocks, but you get the feeling it may be more effective in some situations.

To add to his heroes' worries, Grossman generously salts his worlds with a cast of Gods to contend with. They're not New Testament Gods, cajoling with rewards and they're not Old Testament Gods prodding with dire threats. These are ancient Gods motivated by self interest; mostly not giving a crap about Quentin and his friends -- until they want something from them. And the rewards for heroism aren't always what the story books told you they'd be.

The Magician King makes frequent reference to Fantasy genre conventions and turns them on their heads. Heroic acts don't get you brass bands and parades, they get you bruised and bloody. Stepping through mysterious doors doesn't always take you to a land of wonders; sometimes it just gets you into a dull, dim institution. Grossman's characters aren't likely to describe something as "eldritch"; they're more likely to ask, "Have you ever seen anything so fucking weird?" Don't forget, Quentin and his friends all come from the contemporary world -- they've all read the same books you have.

If you're the type who devours Fantasy novels, but you find yourself frequently wishing they'd speak some damned English...or maybe you're just a little tired of cuddly, benevolent deities...or maybe you'd just get a kick out of your heroes finding a pot of wooden nickels at the end of the rainbow; then you'll enjoy the hell out of this series.

As a little aside: I distinctly recall relishing The Lord of The Rings trilogy a few times, beginning when I was about 14 years old. And I'll admit I always found things beginning to get a bit tedious somewhere in The Return of the King. It always seemed to me that every vestige of humor had left the series and I kept wishing Tolkien would give Frodo a break now and again. At one point in The Magician King I started to get that sinking feeling that we might be heading that direction and my first thought was, "If this is where we're going, I hope this story wraps up without leaving room for a sequel". Well, the last page definitely telegraphs another book -- and I'm pissed that I can't read it yet.

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P.S. I'm pretty sure these sites were set up as marketing tools instead of as fannish creations, but I got a kick out of Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy and the author's site for The Fillory Series.

Maybe Worth A Little Mention?

2011-08-04T20:00:00.000-04:00

While we all were being fairly disgusted by the Debt Ceiling Debacle, the FAA shutdown received a little less notice. According to an ABC News report I caught tonight, here are the results of that one.

- A few thousand people have been out of work while it went on.
- "Essential" personnel were asked to donate(?) their time for the interim.
-The airlines continued to collect the $30 surcharge on every ticket sold -- the one that's a tax to pay for the FAA. The airlines are, of course, keeping the money. Sweet!
-The Senate ultimately agreed to the same thing the House agreed to a couple of weeks ago. No idea why it took them so long.
-The legislation was aimed at saving $16 million in expenditures.
-The shutdown cost $390 million in lost revenues.

Way to go Congress!

I've never been a fan of term limits and I happen to like a number of Representatives and Senators, but I'm starting to have this dream of voting out every incumbent in the next sets of elections until every seat has a new ass in it.

P.S. I've finished The Magician King and I'll have a review up soon. Also I need to get out and shoot some pictures for this week's Thursday Photo Challenge. Also, I need to post stuff here more regularly. I've been remiss and I shall do better.

Some Folks Just Give Chiroptera A Bad Name.

2011-07-30T18:30:00.001-04:00

The other day, we got into a fairly extensive conversation about why Michele Bachmann might be classified as "Batshit Crazy". Well frankly, I kinda took that as a given without any need for further investigation. And so, apparently, do a lot of other people who do Google Searches. She features rather prominently in Google's suggestions when you begin by typing "batshit".

But here's the thing. While it's true that batshit certainly isn't very good for you and under certain conditions it can give you diseases -- even fatal ones -- I can't find anything that ties batshit in with crazyness. Or any other type of mental defect. Bats can be cute!

Fairly or not, they take the blame for a lot of stuff. But I really think we're stretching things a bit when we blame Ms. Bachmann's lunacy on them.

Give the bats a break!

Oops, I Did It Again.

2011-07-28T14:29:00.000-04:00

Remember how I told you I might have been a wee bit of a dick when Anon GF and I bought our SodaStream doohickey? Well today, I went in to refill the CO2 cartridge. And I turned into a dick again.

And I swear it's all their fault!

I walk into the store and I see a woman monkeying around with stuff on the shelves and since she's the only one in there, I naturally assume she's running things. So I say, "Hi, I'd like to refill this gas canister." And she looks at me and says, "She's outside."

This seems a tad unresponsive, but I choose to believe that she just has an odd way of telling me that the person who can help me will be back in a moment. So I stand there patiently waiting.

And shelf-monkeying girl looks at me with a mildly annoyed expression on her face and repeats, "She's. Out. Side!"

I'm now feeling a bit like someone who has been given the response "Blue", to the question, "Do you have the time?" So I say, "Yes, I heard you. Did you mean I should go outside and get her?"

No response whatsoever.

So I continue, "'Cause if you meant I'm supposed to go out and get her, how should I know who she is? There are ten people immediately outside your window."

Luckily, this bit of productivity was cut short when the owner came inside. So I repeated my request to have the canister refilled. Since I've decided to have two canisters so that there's always a full spare in the house, I decided to keep the box it came in. She says, "You don't need the box, you know." And I say, "But I like having the box if that's not a problem."

She snorted. She actually fucking snorted at me!

I un-box the empty and hand it to her in exchange for a full one.

She asks if I'm in her frequent purchasers club (or whatever they call it). I give her Anon GF's name, which is the name in her system.

She asks what my relationship is to Anon GF. I tell her. She says, "Well, I'll need your name to put you in our system." I say, "No, you won't. I want to give you money in exchange for a product and you already have enough of a record of who we are."

She snorts. Again.

I hand her a Hundred Dollar bill to pay for my 20-dollars and change purchase. She asks if I have anything smaller. I offer her the seven singles remaining in my wallet. She gives me a look which I interpret to mean, "We run a crappy little store that sells ecologically sound products that mostly, nobody wants or can figure out what to do with. Why on Earth do you think we'd have change for a hundred in the till?"

I put the Hundred back in my wallet and hand her my debit card. She slides it through her doohickey and hands me the thingamajig and asks me to key in my PIN.

As I'm turning to leave, she says, "Thank you Mr. Gendzier (pronounced as if it's French - GanZeeAaay). I'll just put you in the system here with Anon GF for future reference."

I believe that is what's known as Carte Blanche for being a dick every time I ever walk into the place again. Even if I'm walking in for the sole purpose of being a dick.

Oooh, Goody. A new hobby!

Darrin Stephens, Dudley Do-Right, and Camel Riding Through America.

2011-07-27T17:45:00.000-04:00

There wasn't anything nefarious going on when Dick Sargent replaced Dick York on Bewitched. Dick, (the first one), had such severe back problems he couldn't work. The important thing is that nobody seemed to notice anything had happened.

Aside: I renew my invitation to the writers of The Simpsons to pen an episode in which Homer will be replaced by another "actor" and nobody will notice except Lisa. It'll work best as a secondary plot line. I hereby release them from any and all obligation to me for use of the idea. A teensy-weensy credit would be cool but not absolutely necessary. I just think it would be funny and I want to watch that episode.

Anyway, I think one of my neighbors may have twitched her nose and replaced her husband while I wasn't looking. I can't remember the last time I heard a certain annoyingly low, know-it-all voice coming across the backyard fences. I can't remember the last time I saw a certain extremely tall patrician personage flaunting his patrician-ness all over the neighborhood. The wifely half of the duo is certainly still in evidence, but the man of the house seems to have shrunk by nearly a foot. And let his hair go black. And modulated his voice by such a magnitude that eavesdropping on him when he's in his(?) backyard has become impossible...as opposed to impossible to avoid.

And I may not pay much attention to their kids, but even if I might not recognize one of them after a few years of unobserved maturation, I doubt any of them grew younger. There seems to be an added, smaller kid there now.

I'm not accusing anyone of anything villainous; more likely I'm acknowledging my own obliviousness. How could I have missed such a thing? In my defense, I mentioned this to Anonymous GF last night and she's observed even less on the mystery than I have.

Moving on from Brooklyn skullduggery to Canadian cunning. Once upon a time in the not-so-distant past, a fair amount of movies and TV shows were shot in Canada, but pretended they were set in New York or L.A. or other American locales. This was, of course, to take advantage of cheaper crews, tax credits, and favorable exchange rates. Those shows, at least made an effort to appear to be in the place they were set. The police cars looked like NYPD cars. The uniforms were right. The streets were realistically dirtied!

Now, those bastards are foisting off shows on us that are not only shot in Canada, but set in Canada! Rookie Blue and Flashpoint are set in Toronto. The Border deals with Canadian immigration and...uh...border security. I haven't seen that one, but can someone tell me if Canadians are really losing a lot of sleep over the prospect of mad bombers sneaking into Saskatchewan from North Dakota. I call FOUL! It's like they're not even trying anymore.

Last, but not least, let's, for a moment, contemplate the scourge of Sharia Law making inroads to our cherished American way of life. A bunch of states have been taking this seriously enough to make attempts at outlawing Sharia law in their jurisdictions. Tennessee, if I'm not mistaken, wants to make it a felony to follow Sharia law in their fine state.

First of all, this is pretty unnecessary. It's not like Sharia can supplant local laws. Let's suppose (for whatever insane, paranoid reason), that a thief is caught and he gets sent to Sharia court instead of a State criminal court. Yes, I know, but we're supposing here...just like the guys who think Sharia is such a threat to them. Suppose the Sharia Court finds the thief guilty. Well guess what. It's already illegal to cut someone's hands off anywhere in the U.S. Furthermore, there's no jurisdiction in America where you can blithely stone someone to death for adultery. I'm pretty sure no court in America will accept "She shamed our family" as a defense for killing your sister or daughter.

Now, since the fear mongers favoring these legislative initiatives aren't likely to back off of their paranoia, let's give self-interest a try. The use of Sharia in the U.S. is pretty similar to the use of Ecclesiastical courts and Rabbinical Courts. They're all used to decide religious issues and, at least in Judaism, religious divorces. An Ecclesiastical court can dismiss a clergyman if he's in conflict with tenets of the church. A Beit Din validates a Jewish divorce and settle questions of Kashrut, among other things. (Note: In some Orthodox communities, only the man can grant the divorce. To supersede that issue, NY civil courts require that a divorced couple separate so that the woman can't be a "chained woman". She may still have problems in a religious sense, but the civil authorities consider her a single woman and force the issue.)

The most common use of religious law in Civil Courts is when a conflict in a religious setting ventures into the Civil Justice System. Let's say a Synagogue or a Church or...gasp...a Mosque develops a problem amongst its congregation. Let's say half the members want to split off and form their own institution. They're all founding members. They've all got a financial stake since all were paying dues and supporting the institution since its founding. The court will take religious law into account because it is the de facto applicable contract in the case.

Now let's say Tennessee (or someone else), finally comes up with a law that withstands questions of constitutionality. By virtue, it seems to me that such a law would have to be neutral with regard to which religious law it was outlawing. Then, let's say the East Jesus Church of You're Going To Hell finds out that Pastor Billy-Joe BattyBelfry has been buggering men at the I-40 on-ramp of delight. The church wants to fire him because buggering men is definitely against the tenets of the church. Pastor Billy-Joe decides to fight his ousting in Civil Court. Things may get complicated.

The church may bring in their copy of the Pastor's Terms of Employment and show the judge where it specifies that the Pastor must live a "clean and holy life in accordance to the ideals cherished" by the Church. The Judge then asks them to be more specific. They respond, "He must live according to the Holy Bible". The Judge asks, "Which one?" The Church plunks down their version on the bench. The Judge points out that there are approximately Twenty-Bazillion denominations using the same text and they all have their own interpretations. The judge continues, "Show me the part of his written contract that says he can't have ButtSeks with boys."

In short, if you manage, somehow, to outlaw Sharia, you'd better come up with a really, really, really detailed contract for any situation your church enters into. If your Pastor can be fired for use of "intemperate language", there had better be a comprehensive list of every "shit, piss, fuck..." he's not allowed to utter. Do you have a problem with him committing "adultery in his heart"? Leering had better be on the list of no-no's.

Be careful what you wish for. You may just get a little more than you imagined.

Stuff On My Blog!

2011-07-26T17:09:00.000-04:00

I found the cable for my camera! So, here's some stuff I would have posted on Saturday and some more stuff I shot since then. They've all been rescued from media-storage-limbo!

Let's begin with two examples of RIDICULOUS I didn't get to post. First, we have LuLu. If she'd remained "in-situ" while I ran for the camera, you'd see that she was sleeping with her head in the entrance to her litter box. Instead, she's just wondering what the fuck I'm up to.

Then, we have Big Flats premium brew lager. This is the beer that's brewed exclusively for Walgreens! I'm going to tell you a little about Big Flats. You're free to decide if they are pluses or minuses. It tastes like the first beer you ever tasted after sneaking it out of dad's fridge. "Mmm, beer. Uh, yeah, beer." It costs $3.00 for a six-pack.

This is an example of GOLD; NOT JEWELRY I would have posted. It's Puck! From The Puck Building!

This wasn't meant as part of the Photo Challenge, but I thought you might like to see that the new World Trade Center is actually starting to show up as part of the skyline. I think this building is a little more than half of it's eventual height.

This is a shot from the wilds of Brooklyn while I was working Saturday night.

And last, but not least, because of the way the day was scheduled, we had about 3 hours of downtime on Saturday waiting for it to get dark so we could get the rest of the shots we needed. We just happened to find a place to camp out next door to the place where the World Naked Bike Ride was going to end with a party. There's some socially conscious reason that World Naked Bike Ride is held, but I'm not going to bother looking it up. It's the World Naked Bike Ride! They were Naked (some of them)...on bikes...riding. Of course I documented the event.

This first guy is one of only two men who rode really truly naked. My photo shows his softer side. He was a bit more aroused upon arrival. The event didn't fall flat for him. I'm out of obnoxious ways to tell you he preceded his own arrival.

And regardless of his obvious opinion, I found the whole thing somewhat anticlimactic. The arrival of the Naked Bike Ride was decidedly lacking in naked. (As with Big Flats beer, I'll let you decide whether that's a plus or a minus). Here are some of the braver(?) souls.

I could have put up a lot more pictures, but how many squirrel pouches can you look at? And the guy with the tree coming out of his ass was actually something I'd have given a miss.