Jason’s Journal

To answer that nagging consumer question of “Where’d all my money go?,” I tracked every cent I spent in August. Here it is in an Excel pie chart. Note that I won’t be mentioning any dollar amounts because that’s not your business, mister.

Let’s look at the pretty colors together, shall we?

Boy, is it ever clear that I live in New York City. Jesus. That rent.

As for the other rough half of the pie, this was an abnormal month for spending in some ways.

The Gifts category threw things off because of a few important birthday celebrations. Normally, this category would be absent or well into low single digits, peaking again only in December for Christmas and in assorted other months for celebrations such as weddings.

Using my recently employed expense-cutting strategy, I spent an unlikely zero dollars on music. I bought a few shirts on deep discount from Century 21. And the only book I bought was a used hardcopy copy of—wait for it— Dave Barry’s Money Secrets, from the famous carts outside the Strand—in fact, the percentage for this purchase was so low, it didn’t register as a full percentage, which is why it’s not included in the chart.

That weird 1% for Recreation is related to an upcoming camping adventure and the 1% Household sliver covers things like toilet paper, Kleenex, outdoor insect repellant and roach spray.

In other ways, this was a normal month for spending.

I suspect Utilities (which includes laundry and dry-cleaning costs, plus bills I paid for internet access, electricity, natural gas and cell phone service) is very typical. And it’s a speck lower now that I’ve cancelled my cable TV and Netflix service.

Transportation is also typical. It includes my monthly MetroCard purchase and a handful of bus tickets, plus an odd charge for gas from a mini-vacation.

Regarding food and drink, I must tell you: I have a detailed version of the pie chart that breaks down each of the day’s three meals—plus snacks, soda and alcohol, each further broken-down into eating/drinking-out and eating/drinking-at-home—but it’s got so many tiny slices and percentages, it gives me a headache.

I can tell you, though, that the most interesting point revealed by that detailed data collection is that 13% of the 24% I spent on food and drink was dedicated to dinners in restaurants. It’s a lot but it’s also typical; it’s a New York thing (and, frankly, a Jason thing). I also learned that I don’t spend as much as I’d guessed on lunch, snacks and sodas at work (although these things would be healthier as well as cheaper if I bought them at grocery stores and packed them myself).

So what does this chart tell me? Where can I trim more expenses?

I could prepare more meals at home and eat out less. I could get a cheaper apartment when the lease on my current place expires. Heck, I could get a job that pays more, although this Times article from yesterday claims that I’m “fortunate” to even have a job in post-recession New York City, adding that “[p]ersonal incomes dropped more in New York than in the rest of the country last year, largely because of the smaller bonuses that were paid out in early 2009 for the dismal performance in 2008.”

Yup. The scrimping continues.

I know you were wondering how effective that sign in the kitchenette was. While I was on vacation, it was taken down, then replaced with this:

I work two blocks from Ground Zero, plus I have my Five-Year New Yorker commemorative patch and lapel pin, which qualify me as an automatic expert on the topic of the planned and disputed Cordoba House.

Certain parties have made this An Issue in order to foster political debate and division. The thing drips with baiting and phobias of culture and religion. The mass media bleating continues to keep the story above the fold when it should have disappeared weeks ago. But here’s my crack at it. It’s nothing original but I felt like laying it down here.

First, it’s not a mosque. It’s an interfaith community center. Plans for this community center call for a prayer room. They also call for a swimming pool. Calling a community center a mosque is like calling JFK International Airport a church because it has a chapel.

It’s also not at Ground Zero. Its proposed location is two blocks away in an old Burlington Coat Factory. I work in an office building the same distance from Ground Zero. My office building is not called a Ground Zero Office Building.

Love or hate our billionaire mayor, he delivered a speech on this topic earlier this month. It was a very good speech. Here are five of its points:

1. Cordoba House would be located on private property. (I thought this alone would be enough to settle the debate, but no.)
2. Your religion is as valid as some other guy’s religion.
3. Muslims were killed on 9/11.
4. Muslims are a part of our city, melting pot, blah blah blah.
5. New York endures. Political controversies dissolve.

I would add that the public parts of lower Manhattan (or any other public part of the five boroughs) are not hallowed ground. Things change constantly and there’s not enough room for that here. The most hallowed I’ve seen New York is when a bum christened a sidewalk with his own urine, which is the image I’d like to leave you with, should you take issue with the Cordoba House.

August 18, 2010 Update: Via Twitter, Jason Mustian notes: “In fairness, we’ve been building ‘ground zeros’ near Iraqi mosques since March 2003.” Ha ha!

Another August 18, 2010 Update: On a more serious note, check out this CNN debate from last weekend:

CNN anchor Don Lemon: Don’t you think it’s a bit different considering what happened on 9/11? And the people have said there’s a need for it in Lower Manhattan, so that’s why it’s being built there. What about 10, 20 blocks . . . Midtown Manhattan, considering the circumstances behind this? That’s not understandable?

Eboo Patel, Executive Director of the Interfaith Youth Core: In America, we don’t tell people based on their race or religion or ethnicity that they are free in this place, but not in that place --

Lemon: [interrupting] I understand that, but there’s always context, Mr. Patel . . . this is an extraordinary circumstance. You understand that this is very heated. Many people lost their loved ones on 9/11 --

Patel: Including Muslim Americans who lost their loved ones. . . .

Lemon: Consider the context here. That’s what I’m talking about.

Patel: I have to tell you that this seems a little like telling black people 50 years ago: you can sit anywhere on the bus you like - just not in the front.

Lemon: I think that’s apples and oranges - I don’t think that black people were behind a terrorist plot to kill people and drive planes into a building. That’s a completely different circumstance.

Patel: And American Muslims were not behind the terrorist plot either.

Yet another August 18, 2010 Update:

New York voters oppose by a nearly 2-to-1 margin plans to build an Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan, according to a new Siena Research Institute poll released Wednesday.

The same voters, however, overwhelmingly say the center’s developers have a constitutional right to build it.

I swore I’d posted my favorite Ratatouille recipe, from the The New Moosewood Cookbook (2000), on here but I hadn’t. And here it is. When I’m on the road, I’ll know to find it here and never again hunger for Mediterranean vegetable stew. This one takes about 45 minutes to make and I find it hearty enough for a main dish—Moosewood bills it as an entrée. To make it even more filling, you could serve it with rice or noodles. I eat it straight up. It’s a great recipe for summertime vegetables.

I.
What kind of bug was Gregor Samsa, the guy who wakes up one morning and finds himself turned into...what, exactly?

It depends on how one translates author Franz Kafka’s German. I learned it as either “monstrous insect,” which is vague (Mothra? An angry ladybug?) or “giant cockroach,” which was quaint until I moved to New York City (the Midwest has a low cockroach population).

Vladimir Nabokov, in a talk collected in “Lectures on Literature,” thought Gregor was a beetle that looked like this:

He explains:

A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small. He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown.

....

In the original German text, the old charwoman calls him Mistkafer, a “dung beetle.” It is obvious that the good woman is adding the epithet only to be friendly. He is not, technically, a dung beetle. He is merely a big beetle.”

Not everyone agrees with this insect-assessment, Nabokov himself admitted.

II.
In my apartment’s kitchen, I’ve been having a slight issue with cockroaches. I have been committing acts of insecticide with Raid Max roach spray, which comes in a dark blue aerosol can, the subtitle of which is Mata Cucarachas. Once dispensed, it smells sweetly toxic, like lawn fertilizer, and as it settles, it smells of kerosene. I keep my kitchen clean, so it’s a mystery where these bugs are coming from. (Although, as noted above, I do live in New York City.) I seal all shelf-stable food in glass jars, Ziploc bags or plastic containers. I empty my trash and recyclable bins and bags often. I’ve kept the floors swept free of crumbs. I wash my dishes and don’t let them languish in the sink.

At work, in the sixth-floor kitchenette, people leave dishes in the sink even though there’s a small dishwasher right there that the kind folks from Office Services run every evening. Long ago, Office Services taped up a sign above the sink. It reads:

Please be courteous to your coworkers.

Place all dishes to be washed in the dishwasher.

Also, do not take kitchen utensils that don’t belong to you.¹

The sign was ignored. Today, someone taped up a sign, which I suspect was not sanctioned by Office Services, right next to the other sign. I appreciate the grammatical errors and the black-and-white cockroach photos included for illustration and emphasis:

Maybe I will name the cockroaches in my kitchen “Gregor.” Better yet, I will name them “Vladimir.”

III.
There’s a featured section on corn in the September issue of Food & Wine magazine, which I got in the mail yesterday. Most field corn in the U.S.—37 percent of the nearly 86.5 million acres planted (in 2009)—is grown to feed livestock. And the raising of livestock consumes two-thirds of the world’s farmland and generates 20 percent of the greenhouse gases driving global warming, according to this Observer article from last week, which also proposes a solution to the “meat crisis&rdquo—eating insects.

Professor Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at a university in the Netherlands and author of a UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) paper on the subejct, lays out what he sees as the advantages:

“The world population will grow from six billion now to nine billion by 2050 and we know people are consuming more meat. Twenty years ago the average was 20kg, it is now 50kg, and will be 80kg in 20 years. If we continue like this we will need another Earth.”

Van Huis is an enthusiast for eating insects but given his role as a consultant to the FAO, he can’t be dismissed as a crank. “Most of the world already eats insects,” he points out.² “It is only in the western world that we don't. Psychologically we have a problem with it. I don’t know why, as we eat shrimps, which are very comparable.”³

Yes, insects are high in protein, vitamins and minerals, and farming them produces far less greenhouse gas, methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia than livestock. But what red-blooded American would eat insects, except on a dare? We’d sooner eat our dogs.

I thought this especially after I glanced at insect sushi. One of the varieties mentioned in the original Telegraph article notes that the Argentine Cockroach recipe (“Cut open shell, scoop out meat and fry with butter. Replace in shell to serve on top of salad.”) “has no smell at all, but the texture of tender fish.”

Why should eating bugs be any weirder than eating fish, or a cow for that matter? Maybe because bugs are seen mostly as a nuisance, as noted above. (See also: mosquitos, midges, gnats, wasps and hornets, bedbugs, houseflies, lice, ticks, fruit flies, those parasitic worms that enter humans via their eyeball, etc.) I have never heard of a cow infestation, although clearly that’d be equal parts amusing and disgusting. I’m going to forgo eating bugs and stick with eating less meat.

¹ Yes, I work with some assholes. [back]
² Willingly, that is. 80 percent of the world’s nations, even. [back]
³ One of several reasons I don’t eat shrimp anymore. This is one of the others. [back]

Opening today on Times Square: Pop-Tarts World. A real estate broker quoted in the New York Times article notes that the billboards for the store cost as much as the real estate it occupies, which is staggering and fascinating.

Who, even among the most lumpen Manhattan tourists, says, “We need some Pop-Tarts. Let’s go to the Pop-Tarts World.”?

I’d argue this isn’t a store at all. Rather, it’s a real-world, full-immersion Kellogg’s commercial. It’s an experience. It’s a virtual reality without the stupid goggles. And it’s getting close to what the hand-wringers were referring to when they lamented the Disneyfication of old New York.

I’m fascinated by the things science knows but doesn’t know why.

Take the study covered in this article from today’s New York Times about girls developing breasts as early as age 7 or 8. It recalls a rabble-rousing paper published in Pediatrics in 1997 that found signs of puberty in girls of that age were far more common than reported.

We’re told in the second graf about the “concern and heated debate” over whether girls are reaching puberty earlier (the headline writer [“First Signs of Puberty Seen in Younger Girls”] thinks they are) and why.

We’re told further down that we don't even know if there’s “an ideal age when girls should reach puberty” and, if there is, no one knows it.

And there appears to be a racial component to the newest study—news that the white study participants (possibly overweight ones, if I’m reading between the lines correctly) “clearly” are entering puberty earlier than expected—other studies have found that “black and Hispanic girls mature earlier than whites” but again—you guessed it—“[n]o one knows why.”

In fact, ignoring instances of the word “can” used instead of “does” or “is,” the author worked well to not repeat her weasel words and phrases (which, don't get me wrong, are necessary here). I count one each of “are thought,” “suspect,” “unproved,” “cautioned,” “probably,” “might,” “was possible” and “somewhat,” two counts each of “suggest” and “no one knows” and three instances of “may be/have.”

What do we know for sure about the age of puberty? It initially dropped because people ate better and we got some control over infectious disease. Why may it be dropping still? Who knows.

As a kid raised on Pecan Sandies, I can confirm that these pecan shortbread cookies, from the October 2009 issue of Food & Wine (and, by extension, my save-this-recipe three-ring binder), are an excellent and superior substitute. Rich, crisp and savory. And, because they’re a roll-and-slice style cookie, simple to make.

Vanilla beans: nuts to those. They rank in what I’m going to call the Saffron Pantheon of Spices. A jar containing two two-inch-long scrawny strands of bean runs more than $15—at Stop & Shop, no less. I substituted one teaspoon of pure vanilla extract per bean; the version of the recipe I've reprinted below includes this edit.

Also, my yield on the recipe was about 18 cookies while the reported yield was 2 1/2 dozen. Oh, man: but so good. In a sense, I’m glad I didn’t get those reported 30 or else I’d have eaten most of ’em by now.

“Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books,” reads a pullquote by fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld from a magazine spread that’s been making the rounds.

There he is, pictured seated in a room walled with books. A spiral staircase twists upward to even more books. A 2007 New Yorker profile of Lagerfeld states that his personal library contains at least 150,000 books.

I read yesterday about how Camden, New Jersey is planning to permanently close its library system by the end of the year. The city’s three libraries have a total of 187,000 books (37,000 more than Karl’s collection), all of which will be donated, auctioned, stored or destroyed.

I don’t know this as fact but I suspect that the sort of people who wonder why we still have or need libraries, what with the internet and its fruited plain of free, reliable information, are the exact people who haven’t set foot in a library since school, or ever.

Here’s why we need libraries: not everyone has or makes as much money as you do, and libraries offer access to many things for free, namely books. But also internet access; the photo above shows Miguel Garcia and Damarys Rios (with their daughters), looking online for jobs at Camden’s downtown library.

Libraries also offer access to information professionals called librarians; they're like the web, only smarter and containing much less porn.

There are even free movies at libraries. In fact, they’re the largest lender in the country: 2.1 million DVDs a day compared to Netflix’s 2 million per day.

On a soppy personal note, I have proof that libraries whetted my creativity and made me a better, smarter person. I recall fondly a childhood of summer reading programs and volunteering to shelve books and organize card catalogs. Later, in college, I read many interesting articles on microfilm when I was supposed to be reading many uninteresting articles on microfilm for scholastic endeavors. Plus, you know, all those books.

If books are drugs, let’s keep libraries open, lest we suffer withdrawal.

(Camden library photo by Tom Gralish for Philly.com.)

Monday, August 9 Update: The libraries of Camden have been given a reprieve.

You know, I want (wanted?) a mandoline but Googling “mandoline accident” (without the double-quotes) yields more than 4.6 million results.

Not all of these results deal with mincing and wincing but the top few results are rich with verbs such as “splayed,” sound-effect transcriptions such as “cut, cut, cut, AARGH!!” and hypothetical questions such as “Why don’t they just sell Benriner [a brand of mandoline] boxes smeared with blood?”

Parked blocking a crosswalk.

On the subway this morning, a guy sitting directly across from me was wearing the exact short-sleeved button-down shirt (although in a larger size) that I was wrestling over buying from Century 21 last week. (It was one of those it’s-so-cheap-I’d-be-stupid-not-to-buy-it situations.) Having seen it worn by someone else, I’m glad I didn’t buy it.

These Airequipt slide boxes are from 1959/1960. Each contains one metal tray that holds 36 35mm slides. A friend of mine gave them to me from an estate sale on Long Island. I like the design and typography.

Things are looking up but the American economy has a long, slow climb back to normalcy, according to Treasury secretary Timothy F. Geithner in an op-ed in today’s New York Times.

What’s been helping me improve my personal economy is spending my spare change—defined as the scratch left-over after I pay rent, transportation, utility bills and food expenses—more responsibly.

First, I’ve been eating and drinking (especially alcohol) in instead of out, which saves a lot. Groceries (even prepared food from a supermarket) and wine/beer/liquor at retail clearly cost much less than similar items at a restaurant or bar.

To curtail my slight addiction to clothing and various media, I’ve stopped reading blogs and magazines that are product-focused, such as Apartment Therapy and Esquire. Because I buy most of my wants online, I’ve also stopped logging into my alternate email account, which is where all of my sale-notification emails come in. This prevents me from seeing the coupons, discounted items and new-item notifications at places such as Amazon.com, Borders, Gilt Groupe, Jack Spade and others that used to sap my spare funds. Too often, I found myself buying something merely because it was advertised in an email or online—even though it was an item I likely wouldn’t have bought (or even thought of) outright.

Also, in the past few months, I’ve stuck with a new strategy of simply listing everything I want to buy for myself that’s beyond a necessity in a Google Document or, in the case of clothing, pasting a photo and details on the item into my Moleskine. The Google Document is sorted by books, CDs, DVDs, bike-related stuff and stuff for my apartment, and it's satisfying to merely classify and store away an item—it quells my urge to spend.

Tellingly, I’ve found that revisiting this list to add items reveals that I seldom remember what I’ve committed there, which tells me that I didn’t need that item to begin with. In fact, only once have I opened the list to add an item and found it was already there, on account of my poor memory. I'm thinking this may be the best way to determine whether I really want a non-essential item. There may be an ice-cream maker in my near future. Or, if I wait long enough, the weather will turn cold and I won’t want one.

This classic pesto recipe is fine but I can tell you now that you don’t need the teaspoon of salt—the cheese more than enough salts it up. (Also, next time I want to toast the pine nuts.)

I wasn’t thinking clearly and added the salt. When I sampled the food-processored pesto, I got grumpy over how salty it was. Had I been pairing it with pasta, I would have been even more disappointed.

What it did go well with was this recipe for Pesto and Cheese-Filled Chicken Breasts. I merely substituted the pesto for the custom thyme pesto the recipe calls for. Delicious. I needed to pound-down down the chicken breasts even more to make rolling easier and use toothpicks to keep ’em rolled—the filling kept squeezing out. Despite their unruly appearance, once lightly fried and baked, they more closely resembled croquettes than rollatini, juicy and tasty.

Yes, as children, we all thought that giraffes had long necks so they could eat the most tender leaves from the tops of trees with ease. But, as with many things, the truth may have more to do with power and sex.

Giraffes do eat from tall plants, but not often. During the dry season, when competition for food should be fiercest and eating from the top down should be an advantage, they eat from low shrubs. Female giraffes spend most of their time feeding with their necks horizontal. And both sexes feed faster and more often with their necks bent.

Also, if giraffe necks evolved for feeding, why haven’t their legs evolved to be longer instead? (Physiologically speaking, top-heavy things don’t make a lot of sense.)

Instead, scientists have suggested that “increased neck length has a sexually selected origin.”

Males fight for dominance and access to females in a unique way: by clubbing opponents with well-armored heads on long necks. Injury and death during intrasexual combat is not uncommon, and larger-necked males are dominant and gain the greatest access to estrous females. Males’ necks and skulls are not only larger and more armored than those of females’ (which do not fight), but they also continue growing with age.

There you have it. Bear in mind that this could be a more exciting way to teach children about natural selection and “the birds and the bees” than resorting to birds or bees or Mendel’s peas.

Sucker Punch, “a delightful cocktail made from the sweat of Lady Summer herself” contains equal parts limeade concentrate, club soda, tequila and Mexican beer. Yeah, I know; but it tastes great and sneaks up on you like a ninja. It truly is the New Age Beverage of summer.

Although one of the finalists is “They’d probably be more fun if the barrel had air holes.” Another is “The monkeys themselves should come in three to six weeks.”

And “Next Day Air” probably infringes on some UPS copyright.

Other maybe than birdsongs in spring, I can't think of an animal sound more tied to a particular season than cicadas in summer. In Ohio as kids, we called them locusts and marveled at the nearly intact dried skins they shed during molting and left clinging to trees, often willows or walnuts .

In Latin, cicada means “buzzer” and they buzz by vibrating membranes on their abdomens, which are mostly hollow and work as amplifiers. They modulate the buzz by angling it off the tree they’re perched on. Each species has its own song.

(image via the New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

But here’s the thing. Horace didn’t say that. “Carpe diem” doesn’t mean seize the day—it means something gentler and more sensible. “Carpe diem” means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be “cape diem,” if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.

What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things—so that the day’s stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant—pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That’s not the kind of man that Horace was.

Nicholson Baker, from his novel The Anthologist (2009)

(via clusterflock)

Cucumber pairs so well with gin it’s a summer sin to keep ’em apart. So I’ve been quaffing these, made with Plymouth (Henrick’s would work well, too; or, one day I’ll dismount from my highfalutin horse and buy some Beefeater or Gordon’s).

I’ve lost the source for this recipe (and edited-down the simple syrup from 3/4 ounce to 1/2) but I know it was adapted from the version published in the April 2009 issue of Bon Appetit (apparently not online).

I may be using too much ice in mine (or my rocks glasses are a substandard size) because the drink made this way won’t fit into any cocktail glass I own; I just drink ’em straight from the mixing (pint) glass.

Mad Men Season Premiere Recap: I drank two Old Fashioneds and watched the Mad Men Season Premiere.

I rode my bike to Governors Island today. Technically, I rode it from my apartment to the ferry launch at the base of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, boarded a free ferry with my bike, took the ferry to the island, disembarked, then rode my bike around the island, a former military base with many deserted buildings. Later, I reversed the process. It’s been a long time since I sweat so much. If you go to Governors Island on a hot summer day, take lots of bottled water. There is no free potable water on the island and soft drinks cost $4/can. Our little group explored the island and later settled on the central green for a picnic lunch. Most of the rest of the people doing the same were dressed as people from the 1920s. They danced the Charleston to live music from a jazz band, then spread their own blankets, popped parasols and ate retro picnickery from their lacquered wood baskets while sipping champagne cocktails. A small Dickensian child, also dressed in ’20s garb, walked around the assembly handing out complimentary pocket squares from a wicker basket. (Pocket squares.) My shirt had neither a pocket nor sleeves, and was sweaty and not at all Gatsby-like, and I felt as if I was intruding on someone’s fantasy. I still had fun, though.

For dinner tonight, I made shish kabobs with teriyaki marinade on the grill and, for dessert, grilled peaches. Both were awesome.

On the other hand, photos with Photoshop-sweetened high contrast (see: a high percentage of snapshots on Flickr) seem to me as if they’re going to look (even more) horribly dated in 10 years.

“We are,” says novelist Norman Mailer, speaking, with his customary candor, of the ticket upon which he is presently [1969] running for mayor of New York, “incompetent, innocent, and of unsavory reputation.” But, points out his running mate Jimmy Breslin, a New York journalist, “If you think we’re crazy, look at the other candidates. You wanna die.”

I love it when this happens. I want to collect all of the instances. I think I first noticed a writer running for high office when I read about popular novelist Mario Vargas Llosa running for president of Peru in 1990 against Alberto Fujimori, who won and ruled like a crazy person for the next decade.

And then there’s New York crazy. The Mailer-Breslin ticket drank a lot. They were frequently angry. Many of their sound bites were unprintable, on account of the cursing. Their platform? Satehood for the city. In other words, a New York City secession. (It’s actually an old idea.) Here’s a campaign poster illustrating the theoretical 51st state, a groovy place where each neighborhood would wield town-like power. (Click the image for a bigger view.)

Note the “Free Bikes” icon in Lower Manhattan and the “Clean Air” and “No Smog” promises blowing-in from New Jersey. Mailer-Breslin also promoted ideas that since have been adapted and embraced by our current mayor, a big fan of green space, bicycles and busting-up congestion.

Mailer’s “left-conservative” platform called for a monorail, a ban on private cars in Manhattan, a monthly “Sweet Sunday” on which vehicles would be barred from city streets, rails or air space altogether.

Well, in 1969, nuts to those ideas. Mailer got 5 percent of the vote; Breslin got 11 percent. They returned to writing. Incumbent mayor John Lindsay won his second term.

(first quote via “A Literary Ticket for the 51st State” by Richard Woodley, Life, May 30, 1969; second quote via “Podcast: Remembering Mailer for Mayor” by Sam Roberts, November 11, 2007; poster scan via frumination)

Regular exercise doesn’t appear to fully undo the effects of prolonged sitting in cars, at desks and on the couch.

Your muscles, unused for hours at a time, change in subtle fashion, and as a result, your risk for heart disease, diabetes and other diseases can rise.

(photo via the NYPL Digital Gallery)

A MIT lab has developed fibers that can detect and produce sound. Applications could include clothing that captures speech or, via acoustic imaging, monitors bodily functions such as blood flow.

“You can actually hear them, these fibers,” says [Noémie] Chocat, a graduate student in the materials science department. “If you connected them to a power supply and applied a sinusoidal current” — an alternating current whose period is very regular — “then it would vibrate. And if you make it vibrate at audible frequencies and put it close to your ear, you could actually hear different notes or sounds coming out of it.”

Q&A between New York magazine and Nicolas Cage from the world premiere of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, July 6th at The New Amsterdam Theatre:

Q. You used to do quirky movies like Raising Arizona and Leaving Las Vegas. Why the shift to the mainstream?

A. Part of the reason why I’m even here tonight is that I believe world peace begins at home. And if I can in my own little way contribute to that, if I can keep families smiling, that’s one less angry child that goes out in the world and makes a mistake like drugs or violence.

Man, what happened to this guy?