I wonder how quickly Hollywood and the publishing industry started scrambling for movie and book deals about Katrina’s swath of destruction. My guess is instantly. My hope is that many of these profiteering parasites will die in the next great West Coast earthquake so I can write a screenplay about their welcome loss.

My cynicism continues with what I think is this story’s moral: Fuck with nature (levees, pumps, dams and living in a potential toilet bowl of a city) and nature wins in the end. Wonks have known exactly what would happen to New Orleans in the event of a huge storm like Katrina for at least five years now. “The fact that New Orleans has not already sunk is a matter of luck,” as Popular Mechanics’ Jim Wilson wrote in an eerily prescient article in 2001. Hasn’t living in New Orleans all this time been a game of Russian roulette?

Amid startling visions of thousands crammed into dark stadiums, the desperate clustered on roofs and in attics, the dead floating, I await and dread the total number saved, the total lost, both figures wild guesses at present. Issues of race arising in the floods’ aftermath have been most disturbing to me, from the depiction of black “looters” and white “finders” to the alleged email from a rescue worker claiming, “The poorest 20% [...] of the city was left behind to drown. [....] The planners knew full well that the poor, who in New Orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn’t be able to get out. The resources—meaning, the political will—weren’t there to get them out.”

This guy I work with, the one who frequents the fried chicken shack around the corner from the methadone clinic near our offices, stopped by my cubicle to check out what I was eating for lunch. He spotted my bag from Burritoville and exclaimed that he was unaware there was a Burritoville in the neighborhood. I told him I hadn’t known about it either, nor had I been to any of the local chain’s 10 other stores, but I was about to pass judgment by tucking into my nachos. “You can’t judge a Mexican place by its nachos!” he said. “You need at least a burrito for that.” But upon closer scrutiny of my nachos, which were topped with a delicious and fresh sprinkling of green, yellow, orange and red chopped chili peppers, he admitted he might be wrong.

They were indeed very good, equally black-beany and Jack-cheesy, but the small portion for more than $6 seemed excessive to me. It seemed I was paying chiefly for the nachos’ rugged snap-top disposable carry-out container, as durable and long-lasting as a ski boot. Though I couldn’t deny the chain’s popularity; the place was positively packed for lunch and they were conducing a rapid-fire carryout business.

Burritoville

• (11 Manhattan locations)
• 352 W. 39th St. (at Ninth Avenue)
• (212) 563-9088
• Meal 22/52: nachos ($6.29).

According to a New York Times story this afternoon (“An IPod Cellphone Said to Be Imminent,” by Matt Richtel), Apple’s long-rumored “iPhone” could be introduced next Wednesday.

Roger Entner, a telecommunications analyst with Ovum, a market research firm, said he had been told by an industry executive that the new phone, to be made by Motorola, would be marketed by Cingular Wireless. Mr. Entner said it would include iTunes software, which helps power the iPod.

The software will allow people to transfer songs from a personal computer to the mobile phone, then listen to the songs, presumably through headphones. ‘It’s a deluxe music player now on your cellphone,’ he said of the device.

Apple, Motorola and Cingular declined to confirm or deny the report. But Apple did announce on Monday that it would hold a major news event on Sept. 7 in San Francisco that it indicated was music-related.

That’s funny because this spring, I noted Apple’s whole “missed the boat on multifunctional portable devices” issue by citing the PSP, mp3 phones and a comment from Bill Gates that he didn’t think that “the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run,” adding “if you were to ask me which mobile device will take top place for listening to music, I’d bet on the mobile phone for sure.” Good bet, Bill.

Pray that Apple leant some of its industrial design savvy to Motorola and that this thing won’t be a nightmare to behold and control like most mobile phones. I do hope this device is worthy of a name like iPhone and not just “a phone with iTunes on it.” (And it looks like iPhone won’t be the name anyway, as that name is already taken by a VoIP provider.)

Walking to work today, I noticed that a bodega at the corner of West 37^th Street and Ninth Avenue had been tagged by some not-so-thrilling graffiti: didyouseethelights.com, spray painted in neat lowercase black letters at eye-level.

I immediately smelled a guerilla marketing campaign and when I got to work, I went to the site. It’s a promotion for the new series, Invasion, and it’s really lame. ABC half-assed what could have been an awesome ramp-up to their show.

First, if you’re gonna go though the trouble of tagging a building, at least give that shit some style.

Second, why couldn’t the web site resemble, say, the “low-tech” personal site or blog of some alleged graffiti artist who had been abducted by aliens (or whatever the premise of this show is). They could have posted shaky lo-res video clips or designed it to mimic a conspiracy theorist’s site, chock full of rants and 1995-style animated GIFs and flashing text. But instead, you’re merely directed to what’s like ABC’s “generic new show template” page, complete with embedded Windows Media format commercial and “Premieres Wednesday, September 21^st 10/9c” tag right up top.

A quick Google search shows there’s a separate isawthelights.com site that sort of fits the bill of a conspiracy site, but not really. It still has a prominent banner ad for the show, some obviously Photoshopped “sighting” photos, and no particular flair of the real.

This could’ve been something really cool, particularly if you’re going to go through the trouble of spray-painting buildings in New York City and, according to one blogger’s report, Los Angeles. But the sites don’t live up to the thrill. ABC should take some viral marketing notes from two of last year’s most amazing examples: Burger King’s much-loved Subservient Chicken and the I Love Bees site, which is presently “dead” but last fall was a constantly warping Pattern Recognition-like scavenger hunt that ultimately tied-into Microsoft’s Halo 2 videogame launch.

Man, I did next to nothing today. Like yesterday. So tired from Ireland. Tired from the time difference, not the trip itself. Slept in. Conquered a really nasty sinus headache with Sudafed and aspirin. Sat around, read the paper. Ate some Cream of Wheat. Walked around outside. Updated the blog with all those fine Ireland entries, some of which have photos now. Walked around outside some more, but sat on a bench just off the Hudson and watched the sailboats floating there, and the occasional Circle Line ship passing by, casting waves that caused the anchored boats to sway. Hypnotically relaxing, even with the constant swish of traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway above and behind me.

I was catching up on all the local news that went down while I was away. As you might guess, the one that irritated me the most was the August 23 announcement that the city would saturate the subway system with “1,000 video cameras and 3,000 motion sensors.” To leaven the Big Brotherness of it all, they’re throwing the unwashed masses a bone: cellphone service in 277 underground stations (but not on the subway itself), to ease efforts in calling 911 in case of emergency. I guarantee you, legitimate calls to 911 will be 0.01% of the calls; the others will be people calling other people saying, “Oh, nothing. Waiting for the subway. Where you at?” and more-important-than-you people in suits that start trembling like crack addicts without their little hands-free call device.

But at the center of the effort

will be a dense network of cameras that can zoom, pivot and rotate, all while transmitting and recording images of sensitive areas, from dark tunnels under the East River to bustling subway platforms in Midtown. Each camera will capture distances up to 300 feet and will cost about $1,200. A selected location could have 2 to 30 cameras.

The cameras, supplied by military-favored corporation Lockheed Martin, are “intelligent video” systems in that they’re operated by software that can differentiate between moving people on a subway platform and a “suspicious” stationary object, like an unattended suitcase or a bag lady, sending off an alert to police. I think the best we can hope for from any camera system isn’t preventative, but to get some smudgy color photos of the infidels who just killed themselves and a bunch of subway passengers, like in the London bombings.

We had our company picnic today in Central Park at the Pinetum, just like last year. And just like last year, it was as exciting as a sack of cornmeal. I have to see these people all day, every day; what a treat to see them outdoors, dressed in shorts and eating pasta salad. I stopped by around noon, ate a bunch of the free food, and left after an hour. My boss was out of town today, so I didn’t have any reason to stick around.

I had 92 emails in my work inbox this morning, which I know isn’t as many as you had when you were on vacation, but it’s a lot for me. I only had two voicemails: one, my dentist’s office telling me I had an appointment at 9 a.m. today (which I didn’t; clerical error) and the other a hangup. Not bad, considering. I had troubles shaking the zombie feeling of the five-hour time difference, which I was just getting used to as I left Ireland yesterday.

They went on between high hedges of clipped beech and up a steep winding path amidst great bushes of rhododendron in full flower to the grey rock and heather of the crest. They stood in the midst of one of the most beautiful views in the world. Northward they looked over Ireland’s Eye and Lambay and the blue Mourne Mountains far away...

H.G. Wells, Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education (1918)

I’d avoided reading a paper since I got here since, hey, it’s vacation and no use fretting over events, but this morning over breakfast, I took a look at the Irish Independent, the country’s best-selling broadsheet newspaper. One of the top news stories Ireland has been obsessing over has been that of Dolores McNamara, who won 115 million euro in Europe’s largest lottery, instantly becoming Ireland’s seventh-richest person. Quoting her solicitor, a story in the paper dismissed reports that she “planned to buy soccer star Michael Owen’s villa in Spain or a pub in Turkey” and in fact was staying put in her modest Limerick home. I guess somebody has to like that grubby town.

After breakfast, Dana made us some sandwiches and we set out for the Cliff Path, which wraps a few miles around the Irish Sea to the town of Howth. As we hiked up, down and around the steep path, we watched the tide roll in.

Along the way, we saw ancient ruins, lighthouses, beaches, birds, wild raspberries and blackberries, and, in Howth’s bay, Ireland’s Eye, an island on which stands the remains of a tower and an eighth century church. These days, it’s a bird sanctuary and tourist destination. We paused on the Howth boardwalk to eat our sandwiches, then stopped for some Mauds ice cream, a popular Irish-made brand.

Before my flight back, we wanted to top off the day with a visit to Granger’s, Dana’s favored local pub and just a few blocks away from her residence. But it was closed; signs posted outside noted this was due to the death of Adam Finnegan, grandson of Hugh and Ann Grainger. We instead went to Granger’s rival pub, a few blocks in the other direction, and had a quick bit of Guinness before Dana drove me to the airport.

The flight back was uneventful, unless you count the lone woman laughing throughout the in-flight movie, Monster-in-Law.

Overall, I had a great time in Ireland and I’m grateful Dana did all the pre-planning and driving. It was a relaxing time in a fine country and I wouldn’t mind returning someday to see even more of its sights.

I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.

James Joyce, on his novel Ulysses

Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.

Booker Prize-winning author Roddy Doyle, quoted by The Guardian (February 10, 2004)

After breakfast at Dana’s, including coffee from the house’s brand-new coffeemaker, Dana and I spent the morning in downtown Dublin.

As I am a fan of art museums, we went to the National Gallery, where the highlights were Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, a masterwork of light and shadow painted when the artist was only 29, and Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter.

We browsed some thrift and record stores, and lunch was at Beshoff, Dana’s favorite fish-and-chips chain. That’s some greasy grub, but tasty.

Then it was off to the James Joyce Centre, a townhouse built in 1784 that now houses Joycean memorabilia, a research library and audio/visual materials on his life and works. Inside are enormous rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows and the decorative pastel-colored plasterwork on the ceilings resembling frosting strung delicately atop a cake. The proprietors of the center admit a “rather tenuous connection” between the house and Joyce—at the turn of the 19th century, one Professor Maginni, a dance class instructor and flamboyant man-about-town, lived there. He was known to the young Joyce and pops up a few times in Ulysses.

I was interested in the extensive exhibit on the censorship of that novel, generally recognized as Joyce’s greatest. The censors dogged Ulysses when its first serialized segment appeared in a magazine in 1918, halting future installments by 1920. The work was banned in the U.S. and in other English speaking countries making it a hot potato among the world’s major publishers. Undeterred, Joyce turned to his friend Sylvia Beach, who ran the Shakespeare & Co. publisher/bookstore in Paris (which I visited in 2004), and who agreed to publish the book—the first edition appeared in 1922. It wasn’t until 1934 that Ulysses was ruled not obscene and allowed into the U.S.

Dana pointed out a blurb on a Joyce timeline that I found amusing, given that I had, in my obnoxious editorial fashion, detected several highly public instances in Ireland confusing it’s and its. One was emblazoned in leaded glass at the Guinness Storehouse and I wondered if such apostrophe catastrophes were “an Irish thing.”

As the timeline anecdote goes, in 1939, Joyce’s last novel, Work in Progress was finally published as Finnegans Wake. “Although derived ultimately from the ballad about Tim Finnegan,” the timeline text notes, “the absence of an apostrophe coverts Finnegans into a plural and wake into a verb, so that the title may be read either as a statement or an exhortation.” Hey, or maybe some copy editor just fucked up. Then again, the whole of that book’s language is confounding.

Continuing our Joycean journey, we walked off for Guinness at Mulligan’s, a dark and friendly neighborhood pub that was already packed in the early afternoon with a mix of locals and yahoo travelers such as ourselves, who respected the vibe. Literary and journalist types drank there, including Joyce, who was a regular and liked it enough to reference the place in his short story “Counterparts” from Dubliners. According to Lonely Planet Ireland, Mulligan’s has the “best pour of Guinness” in Ireland and I must admit, it was good, but then, all Guinness there was damn good.

We decided to see a movie at the local independent filmhouse, the Irish Film Institute, and I picked 3-Iron, a South Korean movie directed by Ki-duk Kim, who also directed The Isle, which I saw and enjoyed on DVD in February. The conceit of a man who sneaks into other people’s apartments and homes while they’re out appealed to me. The guy never steals anything, just rearranges some stuff, maybe takes a shower, then photographs himself in the place and moves on. The movie turns unexpectedly, however, when he enters a house occupied by a woman with an abusive husband. That man’s 3-iron soon gets involved in a violent way, but not how you’re thinking.

The film started out reminding me of Raymond Carver’s short story “Neighbors” (a housesitter secretly and steadily integrates himself into his absent neighbors’ lives), evolved into a silent love story, and concluded in a dream-reality out of Haruki Murakami. The protagonist doesn’t speak a word of dialogue until the final minutes of the film, yet he’s highly memorable in his role. I don’t understand why it can’t be easier for American filmmakers to integrate such elements into their films to make them better, treating audiences intelligently and having them follow excitingly new, impossible-to-expect storylines and actions, instead of leading stock characters down plotlines that have been used and reused until they’re threadless and transparent. Anway, good show, Ki-duk.

The heavy-duty mysticism awoke in us a renewed craving for Guinness so we walked over to the Brazen Head, which I had read was the oldest pub in Dublin, and which Dana fairly warned me was “very touristy.” How touristy can it be, I wondered. Answer: very touristy. The “olde-style” facade and jutting flagpoles reminded me of Medieval Times, although I don’t think it was quite that bad. As it was nearing dinner time, most folks were eating in the outer courtyard, leaving the bar nearly empty for us and our pints. We reviewed the success of the trip to date and discussed the remainder. As a testament to the touristy-ness, taped-up dollar bills wallpaper the bar’s walls, each Sharpied with an autograph or a message, with lots of entertaining misspellings of Guinness. Speaking of which, on the wall, I spotted a handsome framed certificate from the Guinness Book of World Records that seemed to prove the “oldest pub” claim isn’t precisely true—it notes, “This is to certify that an inn has stood on the site of the Brazen Head Inn, Lower Bridge Street, Dublin, since the late 12^th century.” I’m pretty sure there’s still a designation between “inn” and “pub.” But I suppose the point is, if you head to the Brazen Head expecting restrained and ancient grandeur, you should instead go someplace like Mulligan’s, which has only been around since 1782, but which actual Irish people drink at.

By now we were hungry, so we ventured out from Dublin to Howth, to El Paso Restaurant for spot-on Mexican food and sangria.

A pint of plain is your only man.

Flann O’Brien (pseudonym of Brian O’Nolan), “The Workmans Friend” (1939). The Irish saying suggests that a pint of stout can solve all of one’s problems.

We spent most of today driving back to Dublin from Killarney. For lunch, I insisted on stopping at a Supermac’s, Ireland’s answer to McDonald’s. Not too bad. It’s more like a bunch of fast-food concepts rolled into one because in addition to burgers and fries, the menu includes “wraps,” fried chicken and pizza.

Back in Dublin, we took a tour of the Guinness Storehouse. It’s not a tour of the brewhouse itself, presumably because such an enterprise would be impractical, but it’s a seven-story museum adjoining the factory. It’s new and modern with plenty of audio/visual highlights, like shuffling through a database of landmark Guinness commercials from the 1950s onward. Some exhibits were even olfactory, allowing you to smell, say, toasted hops.

I learned that Guinness is indeed made from local spring water, not Liffey water as apparently many a barkeep will deadpan. I enjoyed the Guinness ads from the 1950s, particularly the iconic cartoons of John Gilroy, who Walt Disney tried to poach for his animation studios at one point, according to the museum.

I wasn’t aware there was a connection between Guinness and the Guinness Book of World Records, but it was established by the managing director of the brewery to settle questions posed in bar bets. The specific question was “What’s the fastest game bird in Europe?” and the answer was the spur-wing goose (88 mph).

The most amusing anecdote to be found at the Storehouse details the hazing of new coopers at Guinness. The new guy would make his first barrel after which some senior coopers would stuff him inside, along with beer, water, wood shavings and anything else that might be lying around, then rolled him around town for a bit.

The high point, literally and figuratively, of the museum tour is the Gravity Bar on the seventh floor, where you are presented with a free pint of Guinness and a near-360-degree view of the city.

We had dinner at Romano’s Restaurant, a nice place in a dodgy part of town; we had to get buzzed in to get a seat. For dessert, we went over to The Joy of Coffee, a Dana-favorite, for coffees and a shared slice of cake.

I walked up this morning along the slope from the east to the top of Sybil Head, where one comes out suddenly on the brow of a cliff with a straight fall of many hundred feet into the sea. It is a place of indescribable grandeur, where one can see Carrantuohill and the Skelligs and Loop Head and the full sweep of the Atlantic, and, over all, the wonderfully tender and searching light that is seen only in Kerry. Looking down the drop of five or six hundred feet, the height is so great that the gannets flying close over the sea look like white butterflies, and the choughs like flies fluttering behind them. One wonders in these places why anyone is left in Dublin, or London, or Paris, when it would be better, one would think, to live in a tent or hut with this magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe this wonderful air, which is like wine in one’s teeth.

John Millington Synge, from “In West Kerry,” In Wicklow and West Kerry (1912)

We had reserved today to drive the Ring of Kerry, a 111-mile circuit around the Iveragh Peninsula, and the weather could have been better. Mostly it was grey and drizzly but we still got to see many amazing sights.

Killarney is the most popular starting point of the ring, and we purposely set out on it clockwise, as all of the tour buses circumnavigate counter-clockwise. In other words, we decided we’d rather be startled by busses hurtling at us around blind corners than getting stuck behind them and unable to pass. I think it was the right decision.

We drove through Killarney National Park, a special conservation area heavy with forest. We came across a deserted church across the road from a waterfall under a stone bridge.

We were assaulted by a clout of gnats at Ladies View, a scenic vantage of the Lakes of Killarney and named so because of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting visit to the spot in 1861.

Outside Kenmare, we came across a bike accident, then some sheep in the road, but I don’t think the two were connected. Dana thought she saw a rainbow over a valley.

We got lunch at a place called the Village Kitchen in the Dr. Seuss-ish named town of Sneem. After we got back on the road, we were overtaken by some intensely thick fog the higher we climbed in the hills. We came then upon the town named Waterville, which Dana and I knew in advance we’d be stopping at, as it shares the name of the Ohio village in which we grew up.

The seaside village’s main claim to fame, I found out later, is that Charlie Chaplin and his family enjoyed the place and visited several times. On account of the intense mistiness, we didn’t go down to the beach to inspect Ballinskelligs Bay but got some snacks (an excellent scone for me and some warm apple pie with ice cream for Dana) and coffee at The Chédéan, a warm little bakery that sold bedraggled used paperbacks from a cart near the fireplace.

The fog made a comeback near Kells and on a sharp turn, we witnessed a car that had rolled onto its side, although no one seemed to have been injured. We made a few more scenic-view stops to better view the majestic green hills and valleys, goats, bridges and cows.

After our return to Killarney, we halfheartedly investigated an outlet mall near our hostel that appeared to have just opened. I noted that the usually fashionable Ben Sherman makes a line of regular, not-quite-so-fashionable broadcloth men’s dress shirts, which aren’t available in the states. We decided some pre-dinner pints were in order and picked a random pub for them, The 98 Bar. There we watched the end of the Chelsea/Arsenal soccer game, in which Chelsea won, 1 to 0, then caught some Simpsons reruns. Dinner was burgers at a place called Busy Bee’s.

Dana and I packed and left Galway this morning, but not before grabbing a “traditional Irish breakfast” at Lynch’s, a local cafeteria-style place recommended by the hostel’s front desk clerk. The breakfast reveals much about the pudginess of many Irishfolk: it’s comprised of toast, egg, thick Canadian-style bacon and a few fat sausage links, along with a fried tomato for extra heart-stopping power. (I had to return to the counter for jam, which wasn’t included and in fact was 20 cents per packet, causing me to horde free packets of Hartley’s throughout our trip, resulting in a fine collection that one of you may be receiving for Christmas.) So as not to add too much nutritional value to the meal, the orange juice was served in what appeared to be a shot glass. It was hearty, to say the least.

Exiting Galway, we spied Dana’s favorite anti-drunk driving sign. In large letters it shouts “Impressing the Girls?” (Dana remembered it to read “Impressing the Ladies?”, which we agreed would have been much better.) Then there’s a giant color photo of a multicar wreck, the vehicles crumpled like stamped-down soda cans. Below that is the admonition “Drive Safely.” Signs like these, with alternate declarations and photos, are everywhere in Ireland, and they don’t exactly dispel the country’s myth of the belligerent drunk.

Another popular safely campaign I enjoyed was that each county in Ireland has giant signs promoting how many people have been killed on its roads during the past four years. Limerick, for example, boasted 75 dead. Why four years? To make the total more impressive? And why are these totals being promoted anyway? It didn’t seem an especially effective deterrent and remained a mystery to me. Dana in fact has a photographic collection of strange Irish signs, most of them over-the-top pictograms, like the “Don’t leave valuables in your car or else that guy from the ‘Ped Xing’ sign will bust in and steal them” sign and the “Don’t walk too close to the edge of the cliff, lest you hover momentarily in midair like Wile E. Coyote.”

On our winding path to Killarney, we stopped at a favorite spot of Dana’s, the secluded Fanore Beach, which boasts high dunes, open grassy areas dotted with a few campers’ tents, and a wide beach of low, rolling waves. It was low tide and some large rocks on the beach that appeared to be black were in fact the shells of thousands of tiny mollusks.

We lunched in Lisdoonvarna, known for its mineral spa and annual matchmaking festival, just like in that crappy movie. The recommended restaurant was closed for lunch, but a woman there graciously offered an alternate spot down the road that featured decent pub grub, the Roadside Tavern.

Aside from the dazed looking group of Asian tourists in the back room, there were just a few locals at the bar sucking down beers. The walls were plastered in old, shellacked postcards and the furniture was heavy and wooden, as it should be in a pub. The seafood chowder, with smoked salmon, mussels and whitefish, was hearty and delicious, and my toasted ham and cheese sandwich mystery ingredient was curry, which gave it an unexpectedly welcome tang, and helped perk up the mayonnaise, a condiment Dana tells me the Irish are most fond of. (Catsup, on the other hand, must nearly always be requested when one orders chips [French fries], and even then, it’s more a watery tomato soup.)

Then it was to the Cliffs of Moher, an attraction midway through an extensive renovation to make itself even more touristy. Although the cliffs are more than twice the height (more than 600 feet tall) as those of the Aran Islands and just as steep, there were even more tourists, possibly on account of it being a weekend. It wasn’t as windy and the element of danger was tempered by a low barrier near the edge that many folks took delight in stepping over for some near-death photos. There was also a paved sidewalk trail showing the way and lined with assorted buskers and merchants selling tacky crap.

For a break, we paused in Limerick. Despite its charmingly poetic name, we found it a dreary place, although not so much in the squalid sense that Frank McCourt described in Angela’s Ashes, but moreso in that it was teeming with consumerism. At its core is the soul-sucking Arthur’s Quay Shopping Centre, which is famous chiefly (for us, at least) for its parking garage and for containing the only public restrooms in the entire city. Having parked and peed, we checked out O’Mahony’s, billed as Ireland’s largest independent bookshop, and tried to get coffee at the guidebook-recommended Danny’s Coffee House, but it was closed, so I got a passable cappuccino at McDonald’s, which are just as obnoxious as those in the states, only with better accents.

In Killarney, we found Killarney Railway Hostel with some difficulty, having missed the butter stick-sized sign reading “Hostel” at the end of a small driveway between a church and a barber shop. As a motorist, you quickly find the Irish are polarized when it comes to street signage. Either they adopt a minimalist approach featuring no signage, inevitably when you really need it; or, it’s a case of “let’s see how many signs we can cram onto this pole,” in which case by the time you decipher the pointy thicket of directional data, you’ve passed your turn and are on your way to Cork whether you like it or not.

After dropping our bags in our hostel-requisite spartan-but-servicable private room, we had dinner on High Street at D’Tandoor, a fine Indian restaurant, where I ordered and enjoyed a mango lassi and sag paneer with saffron rice.

Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.

W. B. Yeats’ advice to John Millington Synge (1896). Synge followed Yeats’ advice and wrote The Aran Islands. (1907)

The complimentary breakfast at our hostel’s large main kitchen area was comprised of an instant coffee machine, a small conveyor-belt toaster, stacks upon stacks of thick-cut white bread, many jars of jam, random Tetra-Paks of juice, and a huge group of perky young Europeans swarming about like it was tryouts for a Mentos commercial. Everyone was responsible for securing his own food and washing his own dishes when done. As soon as I dried my coffee cup, some guy snapped it up.

Invigorated by our bejammed toast, Dana slung the Punto into a coastal drive to catch the ferry to the Aran Islands. What began as what I would call a “scenic” drive quickly evolved into what I would call “hurtling” as we realized it was taking longer than expected to reach the ferry launch site.

We literally sprinted from our car then sprinted some more to the dock after the parking lot attendant told us we just might catch the 10 a.m. ferry. We didn’t, but there was one leaving half an hour later so it was no loss.

If motion sickness is not your bag, you will not want to take the ferry to the Aran Islands; a plane is your other option. The pitching and bobbing shook the breakfasts loose from several on board and there was the usual zombie-like lurching about from people who couldn’t find their balance, but the ocean motion soothed me. Our destination? Inishmór, the largest and northernmost of the three islands. Narrow and about nine miles long, it’s covered in green grass, cows and sheep, thatch-roof houses, beaches comprised more of soft, pulverized shells than sand, and perilously beautiful cliffs. An incredible maze of low walls, built from large, loose stones without mortar, map out grazing territory and property lines. It’s what you think of when you think of Ireland, only with more tourists.

Tour vans are lined up to ensnare tourists departing the ferry, the guides standing hopefully outside, and I told Dana to pick the weathered Irishman who she thought would offer the most entertaining commentary. Alas, our fellow, although he looked like a grandfather with yarns to spin, spoke about 10 brief sentences, most of them answers to questions Dana asked. We stopped at a 1300-year-old cemetery with seven churches. (“This is a 1300-year-old cemetery with seven churches,” the guide told us as we disembarked and he remained brooding in the van.) We also found out that about 800 people live on the island, most making their living off the tourism racket, and that although many of the thatched-roof huts on the island look romantically snug, only two of them are lived in. We stopped at one of these to take pictures and Dana pet the hut owners’ dog.

The highlight of the island was Dun Aengus, a fort-like stone enclosure atop sheer cliffs that plunge 300 feet into the Atlantic. (It’s the one from which Dana waved to me on Easter.) The site is especially marvelous in that there are no barriers to prevent you from falling, intentionally or otherwise, off the island, and Lonely Planet Ireland claims delightedly that tourists have been blown off the edge to their death by the high winds alone. We saw what appeared to be a park ranger standing off to the side but he wasn’t even trying to convince the backpacking Europeans to take a safe step back, merely casting a jaded eye over the scene like he wasn’t in the mood to firehose jellied tourist remains off the island base again. I crept close to the edge to take a few photos, but did so flat on my stomach. The experience was a rush, as if I was peering over the edge of the world.

I ended up losing my hat to the winds and although I’d like to tell you it was swept majestically into the ocean, nearly taking me with it, it in fact merely gusted off my head when I was standing nowhere near the edge, swiftly lofting over a rock wall onto a field that I probably could have retrieved by attempting to persuade the ranger.

Back off the tour van, we begrudgingly paid our useless guide, walked to check out a beach and a church ruin, then perused the overpriced woolen items in one of the many stores near the island’s main bay.

After the return ferry ride and the drive back into town, we supped at Nimmo’s, “one of Galway’s coolest, smartest tables—a place to see and be seen,” according to Frommer’s Ireland 2005, and a dark, cozy little place that’s set back from the hubbub of the main tourist streets. On account of all the cows I kept seeing on the trip to date, I ordered a really tasty sirloin, with some potatoes and salad and washed it down with a half bottle of cabernet sauvignon. Dana got the clams linguini which was delicious as well, she reported.

Ireland is where strange tales begin and happy endings are possible.

Charles Haughey, London Daily Telegraph (July 14, 1988)

Dana collected me from the airport at about 6:00 a.m. local time. It was drizzly and we got some coffee at the airport before heading back to her house in Baldoyle, where I got a quick tour. Then Dana and I took a bus to the city center section of Dublin, where we checked out Trinity College, St. Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square Park, the pricey shops on Grafton Street, and walked along the Liffey. For lunch, we ordered homemade soup at the Soup Dragon, one of Dana’s favorite restaurants downtown.

Back to Dana’s place, one of her housemates dropped us back at the airport so we could pick up our rental car, a spunky blue Fiat Punto with yellow Northern Ireland plates, a missing wheel cover in the front and some cigarette burns on the driver’s seat. Other than that, it was in ship shape and of an appropriately tiny size to navigate the perilously narrow Irish country roads.

We set off immediately for Trim Castle (also known as King John’s Castle), which actor/director Mel Gibson used for exteriors in his 1995 film Braveheart.

They’re not keen on Mel there. The village thought it’d receive some nice publicity from the ordeal, but was subsequently forbidden from using photos, video or descriptions from the shoot or the finished film for promotional purposes. In kind return, our castle tour guide, a slight, animated old woman with white hair, relished in detailing some of the film’s gross historical and geographical inaccuracies.

She fit the soft-voiced, sweet old lady type personified by, say, Ellen Dow, yet she was also keen on topics such as beheadings. Some skulls had been recently unearthed on the castle’s site, she told us. Evidence suggested, she related a might too cheerfully, that the persons to which the heads had been previously attached were being punished for some especially heinous wrongdoing, as the blades used for the task were purposely dull to inflict more pain. The heads were then festively displayed on pikes outside the castle to deter future transgressions, she noted.

I nearly took off my own head when I whomped it on a particularly low doorway at the bottom of a steeply winding stair.

Tour Guide:

Did you hit your head?

Me:

Yeah, but there’s not much in it, so I’m OK.

Tour Guide:

[quite seriously] Well, that’s the way it was in Norman times—attackers rushing in would hit their heads on the doorframes.

The castle’s keep, which was erected around 1200, is impressive. Most of the tall, 20-sided building remains, although inside, the second and third floors are missing and replaced by modern catwalks zigzagging across the open space. The marvelously sunny day took a powder as we reached the roof, when it suddenly became dark and drizzly, although in true Irish fashion, it had all cleared up 10 minutes later as we were leaving.

After a rollicking cross-country drive, we arrived in Galway and checked into our hostel, Sleepzone. Although it offered dorm-style rooms typical for hostels, Dana booked us a private two-bed room, spartan but clean and comfortable.

For dinner, we tried to get into this restaurant that specializes in potatoes with crazy toppings, but it was so packed and it was so late that we were denied entrance. We ended up trying out a Mexican restaurant that was quite good and had brightly colored tables, chairs and walls.

We then chose a random pub and Dana bought me my first Guinness in Ireland. As a regular drinker of “the black stuff” in the U.S., I can report it’s much better in Ireland. First, it’s richer. The head is thicker and creamier, like a lather in consistency, and the rest is more fully bodied: rich and “dark” tasting, with a slight but pleasantly bitter cocoa taste. Comparatively, in the U.S., Guinness often has more of a sweetly “sticky” taste and smell. The head is anemic and disappears halfway though the pint, whereas in Ireland, there’s deliciously goppy remnants of cream left in the glass after the beer proper is quaffed.

I’d wager the Guinness is better for at least three reasons. (For more on this subject and other entertaining facts, read the excellent Guide For The Un-Initiated To Buying Guinness In An Irish Pub.) First, they pour it correctly here—with skill and patience. In the U.S., it’s often rushed into the glass and served prematurely.

Second, it’s arguably “fresher” in Ireland, having not had to travel very far from the source, thereby avoiding extended stays in transport vessels and warehouses.

Finally, in Ireland, Guinness is made with tasty local spring water. I’d think that in the U.S., it’s brewed with local water (probably from Canada, since Guinness isn’t made in the U.S.), resulting inevitably in a different, inferior taste.

Having forced myself to stay awake all this time in order to adjust to the five-hour time difference, I slept the sleep of the dead.

Weary? He rests. He has traveled.

James Joyce, Ulysses

My flight to Dublin was out of JFK at 6:00 p.m. although the plane ended up driving around the runway for a spell, then took off 45 minutes late. Being Aer Lingus, there seemed to be a lot of actual Irish people on the flight, which was jam-packed full.

I sat next to a bejeweled grandmotherly type named Filomena who as near as I could tell was from New York but was born and raised in Ireland and was on her way there for an annual vacation. She liked talking. I tried to ignore her by pretending to read my magazines but she kept tapping my shoulder with her French tip nails. My neck ended up hurting from having it turned in her direction to listen to her.

I learned of Filomena’s many dislikes: scandalously dressed young people, black people in general, parents of rowdy children, rowdy children in general, the war in Iraq (no conversation between an American and an Irish person is complete without addressing U.S. politics), the hooligans I would no doubt encounter in Dublin at night, and how today’s pop music is wicked and depraved. I was amused that she chose to illustrate this last point with Stevie Wonder. “Every time that man sings, he’s on drugs of some sort,” she confided in me, noting that when she was a teen, she saw him perform in the West Village and even then, “he was stoned.” Stevie Wonder! Ha ha!

She eventually got distracted by the in-flight movie although she claimed her headphone jack wasn’t operational so she had to use mine. A bit later, she complained to a flight attendant about how cold it was on the plane, wrapped a blanket around her head like a turban, then nodded off for a bit. Later, she bought a bottle of Bailey’s from the duty-free cart. When we touched down in Dublin, it was cool and rainy. I was glad to be footloose and Filomena-free in Ireland at last.

I’m a-leavin’ on a jet plane. And I do know when I’ll be back again: next Thursday. I’m flying out of New York tonight to visit my sister in Ireland, so blog entries might be slow coming, sketchy or non-existent, depending on internet access and my free time. If nothing gets posted in the next seven days, however, don’t fret, because I’ll be keeping notes of my exploits and will eventually crank out full-fledged, post-dated entries when I return.

When I came home from work tonight, Andie and Eric were watching Paris, Texas on DVD, so I sat down and watched the last two-thirds or so of it. Hard to believe the only Wim Wenders films I’d seen previously were The Million Dollar Hotel (bleah) and Buena Vista Social Club (excellent).

But I really liked what I saw of Paris, Texas. Slow, slow, slow but so engrossing and so many details to absorb. It’s probably a cliché but it’s an amazing view of the U.S. from the eyes of a foreigner, the mundane things like patios and crosswalks, highway underpasses and construction cranes, somehow seem interesting. The light and color are astounding: I don’t think I’ve ever seen more realistic lighting, from sunsets to fluorescents, that looked so amazing. Top drawer acting from the beaten-down Harry Dean Stanton and the beautiful Nastassja Kinski, who play estranged lovers, and a pre-Quantum Leap Dean Stockwell still champing on those cigars.

So here’s what Bill Clinton would have on his iPod, if he has/had one and happened to publicize its contents. It’s the recently announced tracklist from The Bill Clinton Collection: Selections from the Clinton Music Room, the first in a series of CDs to be sold at the Clinton Museum Store near the Clinton Library. The store operator reports than when Clinton stopped by earlier this month and picked up a demo copy of the CD, “by the time he got to the golf course, all the windows of the SUV were down and he was blasting it.” (Song title links launch 30-second audio samples in the iTunes Music Store, if iTunes is installed on your computer.)

As for Bush, we already know some of what’s on his iPod thanks to numerous stories earlier this summer (my sources: reports from the BBC, ABC News and Editor & Publisher). These are some of the songs he listens to while he’s mountain biking.

Compare and contrast! In the heady days pre-playlists, I remember when the press would furiously analyize Presidential campaign theme songs for any scrap of hidden meaning. Now the press has whole segments of the presidential iPod to investigate and psychoanalyze, dedicating column inches to ponder whether “Running down the length of my thighs, Sharona” is an appropriately Presidential lyric.

The funny thing is, sidestepping the fun-and-obvious cracks that can be made about specific song choices, I really can imagine each of these guys listening to these songs. Clinton’s selections are established classics from gospel and sax-heavy jazz, with a wild-haired song from the sixties by Judy Collins tossed in for good measure. Bush’s selections are predominantly upbeat country, with “classic rock” favorites and goofy ’80s pop tunes blended in.

In reference to the exciting subway bag searches, some cheeky fellow defaced this NYPD recruitment poster at the 49^th Street station for uptown N and R trains by penning “You too can be a subway bag checker!” Not quite visible in my photo, someone added underneath, “The 4^th Amendment is not really that important. Get over it!”

I ate at Virgil’s, another “big name” BBQ place tonight, with Jimi, his friend Mike from Cleveland, and The Man. I’d been putting off the place, which is located right off Times Square, because it seemed to be a tourist trap. (Indeed, I suspect anything within a block radius of Times Square is a tourist trap.) But the name kept popping on New York “best BBQ lists,” so I figured I should give it a try.

Right off I noticed the pork ribs weren’t very saucy at all. They had more of a “dry rub” texture of baked-in spices which unfortunately tasted mainly like salt. Very disappointing. And at nearly $21 for a standard 1/2 rack, two sides and cornbread, a far cry from my previous meal at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, which was the same amount of food, for $7 less and was much better. Better atmosphere at Dinosaur, too. Virgil’s has too much open space—high ceilings, but for no good reason, and they crank the obnoxious country music up too loud. I won’t be going back, but I’m glad I at least gave it a try.

Not a minute after we exited the restaurant, a torrential downpour smacked down on Times Square. I’ve never seen that much rain start so quickly. People were screaming and running for shelter like it was battery acid. According to Gothamist, it ended up being 3.1 inches of rainfall (by Central Park measurements), shattering the old record of 1.74 inches set in 1873. 1873!

More than 50,000 homes and businesses in Massachusetts and more than 80,000 in New Jersey lost power, with thousands more in the NYC suburbs without power.

It doesn’t show up too well in my photo, but the rain was coming down inside the subway stations. When it rains, often there will be a few drips or a slow stream of water leaking down from the surface, but it was literally pouring down atop the subways, which made it quite an adventure to exit the car at certain points.

In fact, I took this photo after I exited the subway, which was suddenly cancelled because of flooding uptown on the 1 line. Everyone had to trudge over to the ACE trains and pack on like wet, cranky sardines.

Virgil’s

• 152 West 44th St. (between Sixth and Seventh Avenues)
• (212) 921-9494
• Meal 21/52: a Bass Ale ($6.50), 1/2 rack pork ribs with corn bread and two sides (greens and BBQ baked beans) $20.95.

Though I was there late last month to see The Destruction of Lower Manhattan photo exhibit, I returned to the Museum of the City of New York for the New York Changing exhibit, which opened July 26^th. Since moving here more than a year ago, I’ve become a fan of Berenice Abbott, whose WPA-era photos graced my recent entry on Penn Station. Furthermore, the style of the exhibit was actually the basis for my “95 Years Ago” entry, which showed then-and-now photos of my apartment building side-by-side¹.

Walking to the museum, I purposely crossed through Central Park at Mariner’s Gate off W. 85^th Street for my own New York Changing experience. I wanted to look at this portion of the park from a perspective I gained from reading an AP article on Thursday (“Clues Sought in Pre-Central Park Village” by Richard Pyle) about Seneca Village, a 19^th century settlement that once extended a third of the way into the park, from Central Park West to the Great Lawn, stretching from W. 82^nd to W. 89^th Street. The village was in the news because archeologists had been using radar to probe as far as 15 feet underground for evidence of relics revealing what life there was once like. Decisions to physically excavate the site will be based on the findings.

History once referred to Seneca Village as a squatters’ camp. That was likely because it was founded by free blacks, then settled by them and Irish and German immigrants. History now shows that many of the settlers were property owners and that the area included homes, churches, a school and a cemetery. In 1856, via the currently hot topic of eminent domain, the city paid-off and displaced some 1,600 people from the full 843-acre rectangle that would become Central Park, including the residents of Seneca Village, which was never re-established.

Walking across the site now, it’s impossible to recognize what was once there. Now it’s trees, rocks, paths, playgrounds and softball diamonds, and lots of open space to sun one’s self, as many people were doing today.

The exhibit, on the other hand, shows in a glance how New York has changed, for better or worse, in 70 years. It showcases 51 pairs of photos, placing vintage shots by Abbott next to ones taken recently by Douglas Levere. He took photos from the same place and at the same time of day and year as Abbott, even using the same large-format land camera, one that generates 8x10-inch negatives.

In general, Abbott deliberately avoided familiar views, although there are a few exceptions. The beautiful Flatiron building is thankfully the same in its 1936 photo as it is in 2001 and in fact is now the oldest remaining skyscraper in New York.

More often, however, the photos show what’s different. Crook-handled lampposts have given way to modern gooseneck streetlights. Once great features of the city—its elevated trains, grand old buildings, the Hudson Piers—have long since been demolished. “Skyscrapers complicate the view,” complains a typical placard at the exhibit.

A shot taken from Union Square by Abbott in 1936 shows the S. Klein department store on Broadway in the background, while in the foreground, the rear of Frédéric Bartholdi’s bronze statue of Marquis de Lafayette flanks a sapling. In 2002, the statue stands same as it ever was, the sapling has grown into a full grown tree and S. Klein has been replaced by a Toys “R” Us (which itself went out of business late last year).

I wanted to romanticize a photo of Abbott’s that depicts the Lyric Theatre, a charming-looking establishment plastered with ads for Charlie Chaplin movies and The Return of Peter Grimm, starring Lionel Barrymore. Then I read the photo’s description that such theaters in the Bowery during the Depression had a clientele that was “mostly transients.” But whatta deal they received: a newsreel, a short subject film and two features, all for 10 cents. When Levere rephotographed the scene in 2001, the Lyric had lost most of its ornamental facade and all of its charm, and had turned into a gay porn theater.

I was also intrigued by the fact that for more than a century, merchants sold Long Island oysters from houseboats docked along the East River. An Abbott photo from ’37 shows two of the last of them, the Brooklyn Bridge in the background and discarded shells heaped in the foreground like an omen. These fishmongers (molluskmongers?) moved to the Fulton FIsh Market, which itself is moving to the Bronx. It’s a city in perpetual motion.

¹ Since then, I’ve discovered such rephotography is common. For instance, Eugene Atget’s classic photos of the streets of Paris have been retaken and cast side-by-side by Sophie Tusler (France), Tom Gore (Canada) and Gerald Panter (United States). [back]

A few days ago, walking from my apartment to the subway, I spied this brochure lying on the sidewalk of my street. It’s copyrighted 1957 and in pristine shape, and I can only surmise it was discarded by the Metropolitan Montessori School nearby.

The brochure’s concern is Operation Bootstrap, a campaign founded in the 1940s by Teodoro Moscoso that transformed Puerto Rico from an agricultural to an industrial nation. It’s written in a propaganda-like fashion, proudly boasting of all the “many products being manufactured in Puerto Rico’s new factories,” including:

• Ball-point pens
• Chemicals and pharmaceuticals
• Cigars
• Electric shavers
• Fluorescent lamps
• Home appliances
• Jewelry
• Leather belts and shoes
• Machinery and metal products
• Men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing
• Optical lenses
• Paints
• Plastics
• Radar, radio, and television components
• Textiles
• Tools and dies
• Toys

The operation was a success with the brochure noting that by ’56, industrial production had overtaken agricultural production for the first time in the island’s history, thanks to duty-free access to U.S. markets and tax incentives that attracted U.S. investment. These days, Puerto Rico’s chief exports are pharmaceuticals and other chemicals, electronics, clothing and food, including canned tuna and beverage concentrates.

I saw March of the Penguins at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas tonight. Since opening on June 24^th, it’s become the second highest-grossing documentary ever, excluding large format films and comedy concert films, according to Warner Independent Pictures.

I must admit, it is cute to watch emperor penguins. The first scene of them, waddling as only penguins and Charlie Chaplin can, gets a laugh from the audience, as do subsequent shots of them slipping on the ice, making funny noises and, in the coup de grace, two of them trying to dive into a small hole in the ice at the same time.

As Warner describes the movie, it’s about the penguins’ “quest for love.” Sure enough, there are shots of penguins that have just selected one another as mates leaning against each other in an amorous fashion, twisting remarkably gently and lithely for such ungainly animals. There are shots of cute little baby chicks learning to walk under their parents’ watchful eye. And there are inevitable scenes of heartbreak as an egg left unprotected is destroyed and it slowly dwells on the parent that a potential life was lost; meanwhile narrator Morgan Freeman intones something solemn about how “the grief is unbearable” for the parents. I don’t know about all that; this movie stuffs 20 pounds of anthropomorphism in a dime bag.

Yet the drive of these creatures is amazing. It seems the bulk of their time is spent perpetuating themselves, walking en masse each year, 70 miles across the barren plains of the Antarctic, facing average temperatures of 58 degrees below zero and winds of up to 100 mph, so they can mate. Then the male balances the egg atop his feet, warming it under his belly flab, and shuffles around in a dense group with the other guys like hobos with delirium tremens to keep warm. Meanwhile, the females go all the way back 70 miles to the sea to eat, then back to the mating ground to switch places with the males, who haven’t eaten in literally months, so they go off 70 miles to get food for themselves, etc. Mixed in with these harrowing treks are inevitable deaths by starvation, old age, and attack by predatory bird or seal.

I enjoyed March of the Penguins. The vistas of the Antarctic are like nothing else on earth, improbably huge structures of snow and ice looming all around, with tiny silhouettes of penguins wandering off in the distance, looking strangely human, like nomads.

At the end, I was only left with one want: to know more about the humans, the French film crew that spent over a year filming the penguins. How did they survive their stay, much less that 70-mile trek? How did they get such wondrous shots? What’s the deal with the extensive “Digital Effects” listings in the movie’s ending credits—I thought this was a documentary and as such devoid of such trickery. And how did the penguins react to humans?

As the credits roll, there are a few small, soundless behind-the-scenes clips showing the crew lumbering around bundled up in Gore-Tex, but I think a behind-the-documentary documentary is in order for the DVD.

I’ve been catching the Harry Potter movies on DVD and belatedly watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban tonight.

The director, Alfonso Cuarón, made his name in 2001 with Y Tu Mamá También, the highest grossing film ever in Mexico, but relegated to art houses here in the states, because, you know, subtitles.

Watching The Prisoner of Azkaban, I felt like I was in one of those amusement park rides where you’re sitting in a car roving slowly down a track in the dark and you’re buffeted by wind machines and spider webs and suddenly a glow-in-the-dark skeleton lunges at you and before you know it the car emerges back into the light and it’s over. In other words, I was charmed by the effects, but as they passed me by, I wasn’t ever cognizant of a plot or any real development in the characters. (What the hell was the plot, anyway? Does it help to have read the books? Near as I can tell, it was something about tracking down Gary Oldman.) But I was entertained, and that still counts for a lot in a movie.

Scenes of interest to me are when Harry magically inflates his bitchy aunt so that she floats right out of his family’s kitchen. The effects are especially good for the Dementors, evil wraith-like beings that occasionally attempt to inhale the life out of Harry. Another swell effect was a hippogriff, a half bird, half horse creature that Harry flies around on like that kindly shag-carpeted dragon-dog hybrid from The NeverEnding Story. And we get the obligatory quidditch match, although this time in a thunderstorm.

In fact, the whole film seems more contrasty and darker that the previous two, which adds to its mystery and its sinister-ness. I liked when Harry was wandering around at Hogwart’s late at night with the Marauder’s Map, which shows animated footsteps of key characters at that moment and what do you know, one is heading straight for Harry but it’s too dark to see anything. Great stuff! This movie would have scared the crap out of me if I had seen it when I was 10.

Pity Sony. Not only has the corporation been buffeted by a recent payola scandal, it’s taken the music industry’s most aggressive stance against what it perceives as piracy by selling copy-protected audiodiscs. Consumers have returned the favor for these bastard platters by cracking the protection swiftly and with remarkable ease.

In the earliest and funniest example, from the spring of 2002, internet newsgroup posters spread the word that Sony’s proprietary Key2Audio anti-copy software (used on audiodiscs such as Celine Dion’s A New Day Has Come) could be defeated by blackening the outer edge of the disk with a Sharpie.

Sony retaliated with MediaMax anti-copying software from SunnComm. Shortly thereafter in October 2003, a student at Princeton discovered that merely holding down the shift key on a Windows PC while inserting the disc would disable the protection. Amazingly, Sony was still using variations of this technology as recently as last summer on albums such as Velvet Revolver’s Contraband. The protection could still be disabled with the shift key.

This year, Sony started protecting albums with new SunnComm technology, including the most recent releases from the Foo Fighters and Dave Matthews Band. You can only listen to these albums after authorizing them over the internet and even then, you can’t burn more than one archival copy and you can’t import the music into iTunes or copy it onto an iPod.¹

One solution was quickly found for sidestepping this protection as well: use a Mac. According to a Playlist magazine report in June, such discs play normally on Macs, importing into iTunes and onto iPods without issue.

It seems clear that Sony’s protection efforts will continue to be for naught. Someone needs to gently point out to the company that it’s no longer the mid-’90s, when only the most enterprising consumer knew about that one seedy nerd with the Macrovision-stripper hardware that could be used to illicitly dub that Happy Gilmore videocasette. Any digital protection Sony cooks up will be quickly defeated, whether by some 13-year-old hacker or some other enterprising individual with access to felt-tip pens, and everyone will instantly know about it via the web. Even Apple’s gold-standard copy protection for iTunes Music Store tracks has been defeated.

Someone should also point out to Sony that it may not be strictly a piracy issue that’s putting a dent in its profits. First, it could be a matter of quality control. Celine Dion? Again: it’s no longer the mid-’90s. More importantly, perhaps if Sony spent less time on futile copy protection efforts, it could concentrate more on improving its sales of digital music and digital music players in North America and Europe.

¹ This isn’t entirely accurate because, as Sony points out, “users can get the music onto iPods by transferring files to a PC, burning them to a CD, ripping those and transferring them into iTunes.” Perhaps Sony’s consumers wouldn’t have to slog through such an obtuse and time-consuming process if the company didn’t treat them like criminals. [back]

Penis-related email subject from my spam folder or PJ Harvey song title?

1. You Come Through
2. She Knows
3. It’s You
4. Permanent Size Growth
5. Beautiful Feeling
6. Make It Bigger
7. Meet Ze Monsta
8. Bigger is Better
9. Man-Size
10. Size Does Matter
11. This Is Love

PJ Harvey Song Title: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11
Spam Subject: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10

Eric, Andie and I took the A train to Fort Tyron Park, two stops before the line ends at the northernmost tip of Manhattan, where we ate our lunch of Eric’s Dagwood-style sandwiches and watched boats and jetskis pass by on the Hudson. Afterwards, we walked over cobblestone paths up a hill to The Cloisters, built by John Rockefeller Jr. in 1938 to resemble a monastery and serve as an exhibition space for some of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval art and architecture.

It’s a dim, stuffy museum of small Gothic chapels and halls, packed with statuary, ornamental windows, tapestries and other relics.

Most intriguing were these spooky oak reliquaries from early 16th century Brussels. At first glance they seem to be busts or ornamental cookie jars. But reliquaries often took the forms of the body parts they were made to contain, so these were designed to store skulls. Some churches assembled large numbers of them within their sanctuaries and paraded them about town on particular feast days.

I hadn’t expected to find open courtyards within the Cloisters, containing fountains and small, lush gardens of spices, flowers and fruit trees. Andie and I decided this is a place our moms would enjoy visiting.

Here’s a quince tree, which I’d never seen before.

As we were leaving, Andie was surprised to find that a girl who works at her bookstore also works as a cashier in the Cloisters gift shop, putting in 13 hours a day to make ends meet. I asked her if she could grant us access to the Cloisters’ tower, which seems to be off-limits to visitors and mysteriously has curtains in its windows, but she said she couldn’t and that the only thing in there was the office of the museum director, who she assured us is a jerk.

Last night, I went over to Brooklyn for the Found Footage Festival, part of the Rooftop Films Summer Series. The festival collects videotapes found in the garbage, bought at garage sales and thrift stores, and submitted by disgruntled editors. What’s presented is about 20 straight bits or collages made from the footage, spanning every video genre: home, music, exercise, promotional, how-to and industrial training, taken mostly from the medium’s heyday in the ’80s.

More than 300 people showed up, most sitting in the provided rows of folding chairs, while latecomers took up the ground in back atop blankets. The film was shown under the dark skies of Williamsburg, on a screen erected in the grassy side yard of Automotive High School, the auditorium of which features amateur oil paintings of cars through history, and which boasts a shiny, full-scale model of an internal combustion engine right around the corner from the restrooms.

Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, two curators of the festival and the guys who cull through hours of footage to select the bits played at the festival, hosted the event. They interjected jokey comments during many of the segments and enacted cheesy radio DJ-style banter in between. They were self-deprecating, too, pointing out multiple times the clips were “stupid” and “irritating.” Maybe, but some were very funny.

The series kicked-off with the music video for Mr. T’s lovingly gruff song, “Treat Your Mother Right!” followed shortly by a festival favorite, Federated Mutual Insurance Co.’s on-the-job preventative-safety video, “It Only Takes a Second,” depicting lousy actors getting maimed and otherwise injured in comical ways.

Nerds in the audience appreciated the clip from the 1989 “Secret Video Game Tricks” viedo which cheerfully delivers the infamous 30-guy code for Contra¹ and the excruciatingly long level select cheat for Ikari Warriors². It’s hard to believe kids had to get information like this from instructional videos like these (and books) in the pre-Internet glory days.

The greatest crowd reaction came from some snippets of exercise videos featuring elderly celebrities including Ed Asner defeating the “stress monster” and Murder, She Wrote-era Angela Lansbury clad only in a towel and taking a relaxing “mini massage with aloe lotion.” Just about as many people shrieked and averted their eyes during that segment as they did during one that innercut three disparate videos: footage from the “best costume” portion of a “Mrs. Wisconsin” contest, a spirited demonstration on how to fillet a live fish, and instructions for using an erectile-dysfunction penile implant, its pump action activated by squeezing the scrotum.

I also liked the instructional video for Wendy’s grill cooks in 1989 featuring a magical rapper and hamburgers with animated faces rhyming about their levels of doneness. Another crowd pleaser, billed as a 1983 Brazilian Board of Tourism video for Rio de Janeiro, features a young, pre-star Arnold Schwarzenegger mangling Portuguese pronounciation and getting frisky with the local ladies. “My favorite body part is the ass,” he blurts at one point, making me wonder why no one cited this fine piece of filmmaking during his grope allegations in 2003.

When I first read about the Found Footage Festival, I wondered if there was any connection between it and one of my favorite magazines, Found, a scrapbook-like collection of salvaged print and photographic detritus. There isn’t a direct connection, but the magazine’s editors did send the festival’s curators a home video purchased at a Michigan garage sale, which was then incorporated into the festival’s footage. Entitled “Memorial Day 2000,” it documents the exploits of a bunch of rednecks vacationing with their RV, drinking, puking, mooning, mud wrestling, cursing, lighting things on fire, jumping through said fire, and other fun hillbilly activities. Apparently, a few people in this video are currently kindergarten teachers and not amused about the ongoing public displays of their rowdiness.

Closing the evening was a flurry of curse-heavy outtakes from a promotional Winnebago video featuring Jack Rebney, the world’s angriest RV salesman.

Good show!

¹ Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start. I’m told that any fan of console video games in the late ’80s has this sequence, known as the Konami Code, forever burned into his brain. [back]

² Up, Down, A, A, B, Left, Right, A, B, Up, A, Down, Right, Right, Left, B, Up, Left, A, Right, B, Left, Right, A, Left, Up, A, Down, A, Right, Left, A, Start. [back]

Strange that my subway line (the 1), which as I wrote in April was rated the dirtiest in the city, has just been rated the overall best line in the city, according to an article in today’s Newsday that cites the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s annual rider survey.

The 1,210 riders polled rated the 5 line, which is like the East Side counterpart to the West Side’s 1 line, the city’s worst, chiefly because of crowding. In fact, crowding was singled-out as the worst aspect of the subway, with other big gripes including cleanliness, homeless people and stazzzxt annzzzztxskt (station announcements). The most positive ratings were reserved for conductors’ courtesy, safety and temperatures inside cars.

On average, survey respondents gave the system a grade of C-, the same as 1994. On the bright side, if there really is such a thing underground, the grade is better than it was in 1984, when riders smacked the system with a big fat F. Of course, at that time, crime, graffiti and Bernard Goetz were running rampant, and subway cars broke down every 5,000 miles, according to the MTA. Now, crime is way down and Bernie is running for public office, people are riding the subway in numbers unseen since the ’50s, and cars break down only once every 140,000 miles or if you’re running extremely late for work, whichever comes first.

O, New York subway system. Will you ever win?

As might have been expected, today the New York Civil Liberties Union sued the city over its new practice of searching the bags of subway passengers, despite reports that the public doesn’t seem to be resisting.

ACLU: Fourth Amendment rights violation and “unlikely to have any meaningful deterrent effect on terrorist activity”!

NYC: The searches meet all legal requirements, preserving “the important balance between protecting our city and preserving individual rights”!

Who will win? Stay tuned.

P.S. Amusing New York-vs.-the-rest-of-the-world bit about the searches in the “Letters of the Week” section of this week’s Village Voice:

Editor’s note: Chisun Lee’s article about Tony Lu, an immigrant rights activist who designed T-shirts declaring his objection to the new random bag search policy in New York’s transit systems [“NYers to NYPD: ‘I Do Not Consent to Being Searched,’ ” July 21, villagevoice.com], received an extraordinary response from readers. Nearly all disagreed with Lu’s protest, many were angry, and some voiced their opinions in the most extreme terms. At deadline, the Voice had not received a letter from a New Yorker.

So President Bush is stoking the coals on Intelligent Design. From the front page of yesterday’s Washington Post (“Bush Remarks On ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory Fuel Debate,” by Peter Baker and Peter Slevin):

President Bush invigorated proponents of teaching alternatives to evolution in public schools with remarks saying that schoolchildren should be taught about ‘intelligent design,’ a view of creation that challenges established scientific thinking and promotes the idea that an unseen force is behind the development of humanity.

Here’s my take: Intelligent Design is a belief, inherently unprovable. Evolution is theoretically provable, a scientific theory. “Theory,” by the way, doesn’t mean that it’s a whimsical guess. As Fred Spilhaus, executive director of the American Geophysical Union, puts it: “Scientific theories, like evolution, relativity and plate tectonics, are based on hypotheses that have survived extensive testing and repeated verification.”

In the Post article, Bush says Intelligent Design ought to be taught because, “Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. . . .You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.”

President Bush, I agree with you. You want to give Intelligent Design some floor time in your country’s public schools? Then suggest that school districts add a paragraph on it to a comparative religion class or a philosophy class where it belongs. But keep it out of the science classes, please.

Otherwise we would have to make time in them for the multitude of other creation beliefs, not only from the Judeo-Christian and Islamic side, but from those of American Indians, Hindus, Buddhists and the growing number of Flying Spaghetti Monster faithful. All that chatter would cut into valuable lab time and millions of students would miss out on their opportunity to dissect a fetal pig, causing them to slip further behind in world rankings for science and math, and then where will we be? Weeping, weeping for our future.

But seriously, read “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense,” a Scientific American article from 2002. The original from Scientific American’s website requires you to cough up a few bucks, but you can read a free copy of it here. More recently, H. Allen Orr wrote about the topic for The New Yorker in an article called “Why Intelligent Design Isn’t.”

I came across a link today to New York magazine’s annual “New York City Cheap Eats” issue and was drawn like a fly to honey-barbeque sauce to the article entitled “The Great NYC BBQ Battle.” Eight places were reviewed (none of which I would consider “cheap” by New York standards) and I was pleased with myself that I’d already eaten at half of them: Blue Smoke, Daisy May’s BBQ, Bone Lick Park and R.U.B. But what was this? Top honors had been lavished upon a place I hadn’t heard of, Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.

According to the restaurant’s official history, it “was started in 1983 by three bikers, bound together by the love of good food, a 55 gallon drum cut in half, and a serious case of wanderlust.” Ah, yes, those bikers, with their wanderlust and marketing degrees. They opened their first location in 1988 in Syracuse, followed by one in Rochester, then entered Manhattan in the winter of 2004.

Obviously I had to check this place out, so after work and a haircut today, I took the 1 train up to W. 125th Street, where it ramps up from underground into Harlem and becomes an elevated train. In time-honored tradition, I set foot on the street and instantly began walking in the exact opposite direction (east) I was supposed to go. I ended up taking a leisurely scenic route through the neighborhood and came across many of its residents having a grand time beating the 90-degree heat in the Sheltering Arms Pool, built on the grounds of an orphans’ asylum and one of Manhattan’s 12 public outdoor pools.

Back on track, I passed the brick industrial buildings, body shops and parking garages that comprise the ghost town of W. 131st Street between Broadway and the Hudson River. At Twelfth Avenue, under the giant, viaduct-like steel arches of the Henry Hudson Parkway, is Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.

The decor is all rough-hewn wood for the floors, walls, support columns and rafters, and all around are plastered old license plates and signs. The hostess was one of those women who can call you “sweetie” and get away with it. She gave me the somewhat dreaded option of eating at the bar, but it was early and not too crowded. That changed quickly. If you go, you definitely want reservations; although my food arrived less than 10 minutes after I sat down at 6:45, by 7:00, I overheard that the wait for a table was 20 minutes. By 7:20, this had skyrocketed to an hour wait, on a Wednesday, no less. The crowd was a busy mix of folks, neighborhood locals and other New Yorkers, young and old, and at least one gaggle of nattering middle-aged women that could have been a tour group.

I ordered a Guinness from the bar’s well-assembled list of 23 drafts, for $4. (Happy Hour, Tuesday through Friday, from 4:00-7:00 p.m., gets you $1 off all well drinks and drafts.) I got the 1/2 rack of barbecued pork ribs, which comes with two sides: I chose the BBQ beans, which were blended with shredded barbecued beef (I thought they’d merely be flavored with barbeque sauce) and “Syracuse style salt potatoes,” which were like red-skinned potatoes, except with normal potato-colored skins. And salted. The ribs were moderately saucy but with an excellent naturally smoked flavor, and were fall-off tender with not a bit of fat. Great!

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que

• 646 W. 131st St. (at Twelfth Avenue)
• (212) 694-1777
• Meal 20/52: two Guinnesses ($4 for Happy Hour version, $5 post-Happy Hour) and a 1/2 rack platter (6-7 barbequed pork ribs with two sides and a square of corn bread) $13.95.

The New York Times has this item they run in every Sunday Styles section called “On The Street,” which presents a collage of photographs taken surreptitiously on the sidewalks of New York to depict a common fashion trend, like how everyone this season seems to be wearing a certain style of stripes or carrying a certain designer-label bag knockoff.

It reminded me that I’ve been noticing every fifth woman in New York this summer is wearing a long, white cotton skirt like this. (I’m not complaining, mind you.) But what’s the deal? Is this a New York-only trend? If you don’t live here, is it a prevalent look in your hometown? I’m trying to gauge if certain popular fashions really do start here and radiate slowly outward, or if this is a nationwide blitz.

For reference, last summer’s trend for ladies here seemed to be those idiot brightly colored mesh shoes made out of flyswatter grade plastic and probably about as comfortable as walking with your feet swaddled in cheesecloth. Also, wearing a skirt over jeans.

I was surprised to see today that kids actually do play in the spray of water from open fire hydrants here in New York. I thought that only happened in the movies.

The fire department allows you to open hydrants here for cooling-off purposes, but only if they’re equipped with a city-issued “spray cap,” which you can pick up for free at your local firehouse. The hydrant depicted in my photos, located on W. 87th Street just off Columbus Avenue, is fitted with such a cap and therefore, according to the FDNY, “only” wasting 25 gallons of water per minute. Illegally opened hydrants waste up to 1,000 gallons per minute as well as $500 of your money, if you happen to get caught and fined.

I didn’t watch Friends when it originally aired, but I catch the reruns now and again on TBS because it helps me adjust to what life is really like in Manhattan. Tonight, I watched a two-part episode (named, cleverly, “The One With Two Parts”) from 1995 and I must say, if this wasn’t when the show jumped the shark, it had to have been mighty close. (I know I’m like, what, 10 years behind the times on this, but shut the fuck up.) This two-parter is simply jam packed full of tired TV elements:

• Mr. Heckles! The annoying and nosy downstairs neighbor.
• Marcel the Monkey! The crazy pet and his hilarious antics.
• Phoebe and Ursula! Twins! Played by the same actor!
• Guest Stars! George Clooney! Noah Wyle when he was young and not haggard! Helen Hunt! Elliott Gould!
• Pregnancy! Including a riotous Lamaze class! Ross’ lesbian ex-wife is pregnant with his child and he has Doubts About Becoming A Parent.
• Surprise Party! But the person who’s supposed to be surprised isn’t!
• Forbidden Kiss! Phoebe and Joey! Whaaaa?!
• It’s a Very Special Two-Part Episode!