Only What I'm Comfortable With Showing You

Is this door ORANGE enough for ya?

In central Queens, these are some of the things I saw...

...that didn't fall on the wrong side of the law.

Queens is the dead center of New York City.

And the cranes fly overhead...

The Longest War

In Myanmar, an unexploded bomb dating from the Second World War killed seven people when it finally detonated. Meanwhile, above, a washing machine self-destructs -- although to be fair, a human gives it a helping hand...

Inner Tubes' Inner Beauty

Eli Baxter, an artist based in Hawai, makes fantastical creatures out of old inner tubes from bicycles, such as this spiky thing, above, incorporating the tyre valves... She also makes such marvels as these, below.

This... is a handbag!

Another Hawaian artist worthy of note: Aaron Padilla, working in wood forms which interweave and interlock, below.

Hurricane Irene and the Aftermath

Hurricane Irene made landfall on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, then made its way up the East Coast, with typical destructive force. Above, an uprooted tree on New York City's East 17th Street, also uprooted the tree's surrounding brick wall.

Everyone in the storm's pathway either evacuated or locked down in preparation, except for those young, naive TV weather reporters whose colleagues hate them such that "if you cover Irene from the Outer Banks, it'll mean a big promotion..."

A couple watch as the FDNY cut up a fallen tree on West 4th Street. This storm came up the east coast with massive destructive force, but not in the most-expected, through high winds. Instead, the heavy rainfall and flooding that followed did most damage, even in states like Vermont which would not normally be in the path of a hurricane.

Another broken branch on another damned bicycle.

Pete's Tavern in Gramercy: clearly in the anti-Irene camp.

A fallen tree branch neatly cocoons a car on East 17th Street...

Sometimes a Man

I had a very vivid and powerful dream about my dad two nights ago. When I woke up, I saw a book on a friend's table, and when I flicked through its pages, I came upon this passage from a poem by the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke:


Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.