It's All A Pack Of Lies & Cigars

A woman on the subway last night, confiding to her friend: "I love my kids and all, but children are expensive…"

New Year's Resolve

At South Ferry the other morning, walking through the phalanx of somewhat intimidating private (?) security guards with sniffer dogs, I saw one Labrador seemingly waiting at its handler's feet. But then he tugged the leash a few times and said: "come on! You ate too much again!" And finally the dog stumbled to its feet and yawned. What's that old saying? "The price of liberty is…"? And that price includes overfed Labradors. 

Later on that same day(!), I saw this sleek beast awaiting its debut on the streets of Manhattan. What could it be? 

It turned out to be a Tesla, one of the new electric/battery-powered cars, which its maker hailed as the next big thing during the economizing of the Great Recession. 

The Ford Mustang is fifty years old. Recently, a New York Times writer wrote lustily about the latest model of Mustang, and the sound of its V8 engine that will go from 0 to 60mph in 4.9 seconds… will there ever be a sound from a fast electric vehicle that will invite such rhapsodies?

Not Much In The Way Of Icicles Yet

When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

Does Too Long A Sacrifice Really Make A Stone Of The Heart?

Religious bigots in Pakistan killed at least 148 people at a school in Peshawar, of whom 132 were children. 

Even in a violent 'failed state' such as Pakistan, the attack, by a branch of the Taliban, has horrified the country… 

…and united Pakistanis in grief,

…who have used the victims' Facebook pages to…

focus their grief. 

These are photos of some of the victims. 

Noy Loitering, Noy

Dumping a huge bag of plastic balls onto an escalator

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!

Bright Amidst Darkness

Habibi Deli Grocery, Woodside, Queens. 

Thanksgiving 2014

11 And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake:

12 And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire… a still small voice.

The Irony

The irony, in a room this messy, in a house where cats crap wherever they want to, and where the state of the kitchen sink made me retch — of the slender, yellow vacuum cleaner.

Go To He'll

An Unsubtle Time Square Stutter. 

Are They Carrots Or Fish?

More Glorious Munson

I hurried through Bryant Park subway station the other day, but screeched to a halt when I saw art by Portia Munson, whom I first mentioned two years ago. 

Munson makes huge symmetries of flowers, arranged in circles which are beautiful explosions of color. Viewed from a distance or close up, they are striking and vivid, especially now that winter grips the city once more. 

He Croaked!

Crime scene: West 50th Street near Seventh Avenue.

Notes: sometimes the headlines practically write themselves! 

And He's Gay

James Randi first entered my consciousness when I was devouring books in Dungannistan library, aged 13 or 14. I knew that he was a magician, but a peculiar kind of magician, one whose work kind of went in the opposite direction from spectacular mystification. Randi is a debunker, a de-mystifier, who has made his name by poking holes in the 'magic' tricks of others, exposing those who claim supernatural powers or psychic abilities as practioners of deceit.

Randi's severely rational, scientifically skeptical cast of mind appealed to me as a school boy. Today, the NYTimes magazine profiles Randi, and reveals something I had not known: Randi is openly gay.

Darien, Connecticut

Of course, the Darien mentioned in the poem by John Keats, below, is not the same as the one in Connecticut. Keats' Darien is Darien Province in Panama. Locals in Conn. pronounce their hometown, 'dairy-ANN', or so I was told. 

The other Darien, the only other one that I have ever heard of: I suppose that ever since Keats wrote this sonnet, people have been pointing out that Vasco Núñez de Balboa, not Cortes, was the first European to see the Pacific Ocean: 

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

In Which Zach And I Find Ed Koch's Grave, And a Mysterious Wooden LampPost

Ed Koch's grave: north-west corner, 153rd and Amsterdam Avenue. 

As we're leaving the graveyard, we see a mysterious wooden lamp post. 

Wooden all the way up to the light fitting. 

And with a socket near the base... 

...that charged Zach's phone! 

Or Just Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

Lost In The Wash

Something has been omated in Bushwick! See also here. 

Read To Your Children

This endearing little story comes from the French Genevan-born philosopher of liberty and democracy, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, one of the best-known figures of the 18th century Enlightenment:

Every night, after supper, we read some part of a small collection of romances [i.e., adventure stories], which had been my mother's. My father's design was only to improve me in reading, and he thought these entertaining works were calculated to give me a fondness for it; but we soon found ourselves so interested in the adventures they contained, that we alternately read whole nights together and could not bear to give over until at the conclusion of a volume. Sometimes, in the morning, on hearing the swallows at our window, my father, quite ashamed of this weakness, would cry, "Come, come, let us go to bed; I am more a child than thou art." 

— Rousseau, Confessions, Book 1.

Rousseau is of course the author of The Social Contract, and its famous opening line, which I think is one of the greatest opening lines of all time:   

"L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers."

("Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains"). It's sometimes translated "… but is everywhere in chains", however, there is in the use of 'and', a greater sense of astonishment at the statement as it unfolds itself: "Man is born free, and (yet) is everywhere in chains!" It has set in motion the acceptance of its own logic, so that immediately, the reading mind asks: 'how can this be?' 

There could hardly be a statement more diametrically opposed to the one I heard so frequently as a child, from Psalm 51, verse 5: 

"Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me". 

Everything You Own Plus 4,500%

A firm of lawyers? Greed, Hasno & Limits, attorneys-at-law. 

One Mourns As

Wooden World

I saw some amazing art recently, in Chelsea. I took my friend Rob to the Marianne Boesky Gallery, at 509 West 24th Street, where artist Roxy Paine has imagined the complex, untidy world as made singly out of maple wood.

A Fall Friday

Summer's lease is up, and it has flitted away early this year, replaced by the exquisitely cool, mild days of Autumn in New York. Some, many, people say, that this is the city at its finest. 

Normally, these calmer days and cooler nights do not come upon us until late October, and are squeezed into a week or ten days, before suddenly, it seemed in recent years, Hallowe'en was the last day of ethereal warmth. November 1st, All Saints' Day, would arrive with the almost scalding cold, the howling rain and the freezing wind of winter. 

In the gardens of the American Museum of Natural History, there is a fairly ordinary pink granite obelisk, on which are many names on three of its sides. 

Barack Obama is listed here, amongst many others. The President's chiseled name was receiving a power hose cleaning today, along with the others: see above. The obelisk lists Americans who have been awarded a Nobel Prize. 

The World Has Gone Insane

Tito ♡ Marisol

Nay

Despite appeals to Braveheart-style radicalism, and the romantic tug of finally steering their ship of state themselves, I think the Scots will vote to stay in the U.K., in today's historic referendum... More tomorrow.

2 Boots

I saw these wonderful boots on the 2 train, tonight!

What A Surprise

"I hear that there are a thousandfold new suicidal religious maniacs out to get us".

Once upon a time, the United States was attacked by a bunch of suicidal religious maniacs, who hijacked passenger jets and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and abortively, into a field in Pennsylvania.

The U.S. President, infamously obtuse about his lack of foreign policy smarts up until Sept. 11th, 2001, ordered attacks against the attackers' training camps in Afghanistan -- fair enough -- and then railroaded the world into the invasion of Iraq.

Many were the voices, high and low, that cried: "don't do it! You'll regret it! You're going to topple a nasty regime and find it replaced by a worse one! Or worse still, you'll topple a nasty regime -- which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks anyway -- and unleash a thousandfold new suicidal religious maniacs! And perhaps a couple of generations will be born, will blossom, then wither away, before this big, fat, but entirely preventable problem, recedes."

And yet, for someone as well informed as a U.S. President, life is full of surprisis.

There's (Not Enough) Something In The Water

There's a piece in today's NY Times about Lithium, the chemical element that has been prescribed for certain types of depression for years. It seems that Lithium is in fact present in nature, by no means abundantly, but in trace amounts that might in fact have some small affect via drinking water... 

Most interesting was this, from the comments section:

I can't speak to the benefits of taking lithium, but I can relay a story related to drinking lithium water. There's a hot springs in New Mexico that has a lithium spring. The entire hot springs is devoted to relaxation and increased calm, so I can't speak specifically to the effects of lithium water and its ability to lower one's level of anxiety or depression. However, I can speak to the effects that it had on the vividness of one's dreams ... and this was an effect that all of my family members reported ... we had the most incredibly vivid and realistic dreams when drinking the lithium water. When the lithium water was not available, no vivid dreams. When it was available, vivid dreams occurred.

This too:

7-Up was originally called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda and contained lithium citrate right up until 1950. In fact, it’s been suggested that the 7 in 7-Up refers to the atomic mass of the lithium.

When I checked, the atomic mass of lithium is in fact 6.94, which might be rounded up to 7, but do chemists routinely work with averaged numbers and inexact figures? Probably not.

The End Of One Thing and The Beginning Of Another

Covert Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn. 

To Dromat, Or To Undromat?

"And Our Little Lives Are Rounded With a Sale"

How quickly did joy [HAMSTER SALE $5.00!!!] become despair[SOLD OUT...], as like the… the… the turn of a wheel?! 

Meet Zorthraab… Under-commissioner for Trade, Warp Drives & Mental Health

On the Tiles

Great Lakes

A well-known feature of North American geography is its Great Lakes, five in total, Superior, Huron, Ontario, Michigan and Erie, seen below during early winter.

There are other freshwater places in our world, worthy of the name 'Great Lakes'. In Mongolia, for example:

Although these great lakes are fast drying up, and so are 'great' only in the past tense. 

In central, eastern Africa, there are more Great Lakes: that is Lake Victoria, above. Like the North American ones, these are in fact quite vast, inland freshwater seas.