Morning in Brooklyn

As dawn rose over Brooklyn this morning, this stretch of Fulton Street felt almost like a Wild Western set. Two strange young women accosted me at one point and one of them accused me of the crime of recklessly walking past her without admiring her ass out loud. Her friend looked on with slightly greater seriousness, and said her feet were aching from walking and could she and her friend come "chill with me?" She looked at me beseechingly.

I declined with regret. And walked on. A couple of blocks along Fulton, I realized I needed a coffee and a roll, and so I stopped at the perspex window-turntable-serving hatch of a deli. This allowed the two women to catch up with me. By now they had acquired a young man with eyes like a cat, who narrowed his eyes possessively as he glanced at me, then looked away. He spoke far too loudly for the time of day.

Recently on Ninth Avenue

A fire truck and a beer truck somehow got awkwardly snagged... no one was injured, but it took the fire fighters six hours to cut themselves out of the beer truck.

Lest We Forget

"If Ah push ma finger down hard, here...

From the New York Times: 

Physicians for Human Rights has analyzed a wide range of previously released U.S. government documents and reports, many of them heavily censored. It found that the Bush administration used medical personnel — including doctors, psychologists and physician’s assistants — to help justify acts that had long been classified by law and treaty as illegal or unethical and to redefine them as safe, legal and effective when used on terrorism suspects.

...this is what happens to the terrists over there..."

"The Prettiest Town in Canada"

This, my friends, is Goderich, a town of 8,000 souls, on the edge of Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada. I visited Goderich often in the summer of 1987. I was 14 at the time.

Queen Elizabeth II once said that Goderich was "the prettiest town in Canada." High praise indeed!

Underneath Goderich is where the real fun happens — in what is the largest salt mine in the world, stretching out under the town and under Lake Huron for five kilometers. At the time of my visits, locals talked of there being a four lane highway for trucks hauling salt, way below the ground.

The Mournes

The Mourne Mountains, as seen from the beach at Dundrum, County Down. I took this photograph in summer 2007.