October 2005 Archives

I wasn’t aware buying bedding was so complicated. Or maybe in my common fashion, I’m just making it complicated. For my new place, I’ve had to buy all that stuff because the sheets, comforters and such I’m using now are on loan from Andie. Now that she’s graciously donated her Ikea futon love seat and large extra bed to me, I need to get my own sheets, blankets and pillows.

You have all those bed sizes, like queen, double, single, twin, deluxe and what have you, none of which I can ever remember. Then you have thread counts to take into account, and options to buy all the bedding in one package or separately. Then you’ve got terms I’ve never heard, like “sham,” which, correct me if I’m wrong, is some sort of mutant pillow that’s only meant to be used as a decoration, like those fruit-shaped soaps in your Mom’s guest bathroom.

This is all not to mention styles, most of which, at least for the comforters offered by the likes of Target and Bed, Bath & Beyond, seem frozen in the garish design world of 1988. (Not that I care too much about that, since most of the time I’ll be using such bedding, it will be too dark for me to see it.)

After much soul-searching and consultation of lady-type coworkers as to what exactly “flat sheets” and “dust ruffles” are, I opted for a Bed-in-a-Bag package from Bed, Bath & Beyond for a mere $60 (before tax and shipping/handling) that includes a comforter, two standard shams, dust ruffle, fitted sheet and flat sheet. (Actually, the poorly edited description lists the phrase “two standard shams” twice, which I’m assuming is a typo, and that they meant pillowcases, which are depicted in the photo.)

The sheets and cases in this particular package are a really fruity paisley, described (or not, really) as “lovely periwinkle,” and it doesn’t take too much imagination to conjure an image of Prince curled up in them and dreaming of himself. The comforter has handsome vertical stripes in various shades of blue. Target was offering a comforter similar to this, but more expensive because it had a higher thread count and was designed by Isaac Mizrahi, although I imagine both were sewn by the same underpaid Chinese person but that my non-Mizrahi version was sewn late at night when she was really sleepy, so the lines aren’t as straight.

I’m also concerned my sheet set has an appallingly low thread count, likely classified by some national bedding association as “gossamer,” with the heft and tensile strength of good intentions. But I’ve worn most of my previous sheet sets to death, and I’m not going to replace the things until they have gaping holes in them, so maybe thread count shouldn’t be a worry.

Do you have trouble spelling? If so, you’ve got a friend in Daniel Webster, the father of the first popular American dictionary. Lately I’ve been reading bits of H.L. Mencken’s book from 1921, The American Language, and enjoyed the section on American spelling and Webster.

Already a superstar in lexicographical circles, Webster’s first dictionary in 1806 made him a household name. The most popular dictionary in the U.S. prior to his was published by an Englishman, Samuel Johnson, who made no secret of his disdain toward the new republic’s scrappy citizenry and its rowdy ways with the alphabet.

Americans took a near-patriotic stance in embracing the new book and its reforms, which were rooted in a quote by Benjamin Franklin that “those people spell best who do not know how to spell.” As such, Webster dropped silent letters and advocated phonetic spellings. Many characteristically direct American spellings exist thanks to him, including jail and wagon, instead of gaol and waggon.

Taking the opposite tack of Johnson’s directives, Webster removed the u from -our words such as colour and honour, flipflopped the ending of -re words including centre and theatre, and changed the c in words like defence to an s. Of course, Americans still adhere to these conventions of Webster’s today, while Brits have stuck with the “original” spellings.

But many of his proposals viewed now resemble an F-worthy fourth-grader’s spelling test. Webster listed tongue as tung, group as groop and women as wimmen, not to mention the appropriately heinous hainous. Across the board, he deflowered ph- words (such as phantom) to start with an f. He mercilessly muted silent letters: thumb was stubbed to thum, island became an iland and leopard lost a spot as leperd.

Many of these edits do make at least some practical sense, falling in line with those anti-British revisions that took root. However, later in life, Webster was dogged by his opponents for the arbitrariness of his reforms. One typical argument would ask, for instance, why he would change the c to an s in words like offense, but spell fence that way.

Time has been kinder to Webster, revealing that his spelling simplifications were a giant step forward for a country that had a very, shall we say, flexible orthography in its youth, one that allowed people to spell eternal as aetaernall, for example, and get away with it. On the other hand, bad spellers still aren’t helped much by a language that, despite Webster’s efforts, has more exceptions to its spelling than rules.

Because I know you were still wondering about that smell...

Good Smell Vanishes, But It Leaves Air of Mystery

By Anthony DePalma

The New York Times, October 29, 2005

The night air all over Manhattan was brisk, with a hint of winter and a dash of something sweetly out of the ordinary. Some thought it smelled like maple syrup. Some said caramel, or a freshly baked pie, or Bit-O-Honey candy bars.

From downtown Manhattan to the Upper East Side, Prospect Heights in Brooklyn and parts of Staten Island, the question was the same on Thursday night and into early yesterday: What was that smell?

The aroma not only revived memories of childhood, but in a city scared by terrorism, it raised vague worries about an attack deviously cloaked in the smell of grandma’s kitchen.

It was so seductive that many New Yorkers found themselves behaving strangely, succumbing to urges usually kept under wraps. One woman who never touches the stuff said she was inspired to eat ice cream.

Late yesterday, nearly 24 hours after the smell had spread through the city, sparking hundreds of bewildered calls to the city’s 311 emergency hot line, officials said that they had determined that the smell had not been hazardous and that it had dissipated as quickly, and mysteriously, as it had appeared.

Even after chasing down anonymous tips and chasing up several blind alleys, however, they did not know where it had come from.

The odor was first detected around 8 p.m. on Thursday in Lower Manhattan. It seemed to spread quickly uptown and into parts of the other boroughs—so quickly that officials expressed concern. The city’s Office of Emergency Management sent out feelers to the Police and Fire Departments, state emergency response agencies in New York and New Jersey, and the United States Coast Guard, which communicated with tugboats and container ships at sea to determine whether the odor was being detected there.

Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, coolly told reporters yesterday that tests and air monitoring had revealed “nothing of a hazardous nature.”

“It’s believed to be some sort of food substance, but we can’t substantiate that at this time,” Mr. Kelly said. He confirmed that the source of the smell seemed to be in Lower Manhattan.

The chase led the city’s environmental bloodhounds to some interesting places. Investigators working on a tip checked the Jacques Torres Chocolate Haven in SoHo, but the owner insisted he had not been the culprit. His staff had spent the afternoon roasting almonds, he said. And anyway, chocolate, for those who really know, smells bitter, not sweet.

“Perhaps if it was a chocolate smell, people would be running here today,” Mr. Torres said from his shop, which he said was no busier than normal for a Friday in autumn. His chef, Susana Garcia, 31, who was on duty Thursday, said the mysterious odor was definitely more like maple syrup than like chocolate. It was, Mr. Torres said, a kind of warm-your-heart holiday smell appropriate for this time of year.

If there was anyone in New York who could recognize the aroma of maple syrup, it would be a Canadian like Jeff Breithaupt, 42, cultural affairs officer at the Canadian Consulate in New York. He said he was out running on the Upper East Side last night when the smell came to him. Right away, he thought it was caramel candy.

A labor organizer, Rekha Eanni, said she could not characterize the exact smell, but after getting out of a night class at New York University she was overcome with a craving for pumpkin pie. When she got home there was no pie, so she did something she never does.

“I made myself a pretty big bowl of vanilla ice cream with honey and cornflakes,” she said.

Experts say that no human sense is more directly connected to the emotions than the sense of smell. “Before we know we are even in contact with a smell we have already received it and reacted to it,” a professional perfumer, Mandy Aftel, said. “Smells come in without language and go directly to the emotional center of the brain. That’s why they are so connected to memory.”

As soon as he smelled the mystery smell, Greg Nickson, 45, a freelance cameraman, was transported, like Marcel Proust, to things past, things like the chocolate factory that flooded his childhood neighborhood in Chicago with sweet aromas.

When he poked his head out of his 10th-floor apartment window to look for his wife, Mr. Nickson got a good whiff of it, and it puzzled him.

“I thought,” he said. “‘How could the smell be so pervasive?’”

With the cold nighttime air trapped under a lid of warm air over the city, and only a 3-mile-an-hour wind, any odor would have been kept low to the ground, where it could have slipped between buildings to work its way uptown and to the other boroughs, said Patrick Kinney, an associate professor of environmental science at Columbia University.

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was asked at City Hall about the smell, he repeated that tests showed it was not dangerous.

With the mayor enjoying a sizable lead in polls about the upcoming election, someone asked whether it struck him as, perhaps, the sweet smell of success.

He gave an enigmatic answer. “Nature,” the mayor said, “should be allowed to take care of its own.”

Kareem Fahim and Colin Moynihan contributed reporting for this article.

Admit it; if you didn’t know better, you’d think this article (or at least its headline) was from The Onion.

Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers

By Kareem Fahim

The New York Times, October 28, 2005

An unseen, sweet-smelling cloud drifted through parts of Manhattan last night. Arturo Padilla walked through it and declared that it was awesome.

“It’s like maple syrup. With Eggos. Or pancakes,” he said. “It’s pleasant.”

The odor had followed Mr. Padilla and his friend along their walk in Lower Manhattan, from a dormitory on Fulton Street, to Pace University on Spruce Street, and back down again, to where they stood now, near a Dunkin’ Donuts. Maybe it was from there, he said. But it wasn’t.

Mr. Padilla was not alone. Reports of the syrupy cloud poured in from across Manhattan after 9 p.m. Some feared that it was something sinister.

There were so many calls that the city’s Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of Environmental Protection to look into it.

By 11 p.m., the search had turned up nothing harmful, according to tests of the air. Reports continued to come in from as far north as 112th Street shortly before midnight. In Lower Manhattan, where the smell had begun to fade, it was back, stronger than before, by 1 a.m.

“We are continuing to sample the air throughout the affected area to make sure there’s nothing hazardous,” said Jarrod Bernstein, an emergency management spokesman. “What the actual cause of the smell is, we really don’t know.”

There were conflicting accounts as to its nature. A police officer who had thrown out her French vanilla coffee earlier compared it to that. Two diplomats from the Netherlands disagreed, politely. Rieneke Buisman said it smelled like roasted peanuts. Her friend Joris Geeven said it reminded him of a Dutch cake called peperkoek, though he could not describe that smell.

Did I mention why my new apartment came on the market so quickly? The previous tenant was evicted, as noted by the red-lettered Marshal’s Legal Possession notice taped to the front of my door. So thank you, Robert Lee Farley, wherever you are.

After work, I boarded the A train at Penn Station, which took precisely 30 minutes to arrive at my Dyckman Street stop, a 15-minute increase over my old commute, as I had predicted. I picked up the keys from the super, Rodolfo, and took some snapshots of the place.

I’m only now noticing in this view that the wood floor is a different style in the front hall than it is in the main room. Here it’s of a “bowling lane” school of cut and color. That’s a closet on the left; I was standing in the front doorway of the apartment when I took the photo.

In a closer view of the main room, shown above, you can see the floor is of “basketball court” model parquetry. The kitchen stuff is on the left-hand wall: gas range and oven, fridge, countertop, drawers and cabinet space. You’ll also recognize the de rigueur steam heater in the corner. There’s an air conditioner mounted in the right-hand window, but I didn’t test it. The view from the windows is of a large courtyard, a small garden area of which is accessible to people who live in my building.

Above is the nondescript bedroom.

In the bathroom, the super repaired and re-grouted the shower tiles. It previously looked as if a miniature Kool-Aid Man had attempted to burst through the wall. I like that there’s a window in here; it’s cracked open because the whole place was just painted. The arrangement of the showerhead and taps is quirky. They’re placed not at the head or foot of the tub, but on the facing wall in the middle.

There are some additional things I haven’t previously mentioned that I like about this place. First, the building has a name. Remember back when they chiseled the name of a building on a keystone centered high on its face or above the door? Mine is called Lucille.

Second, the apartment is on the top floor of the building, so there should be less noise, although I think it also means it’ll be hotter in the summer. It’s a tradeoff I can live with.

Third, there are a lot of Hispanics in my neighborhood. Judging by the after-work waves of people, it’s almost exclusively so. Two words: taco trucks. They’re like ice cream trucks, but with, you know, tacos and stuff. I saw several, parked at the curb, including one boasting a neon sign that read “Chalupas.” I think I’ll enjoy the neighborhood.

Is one ever too old to carve jack-o’-lanterns?

Andie, myself, Eric and Katie don’t think so.

I signed the lease and a bunch of other paperwork today, so now the new apartment is officially mine. I can pick up the keys and photocopies of the paperwork after work tomorrow, by which time the superintendent said he’d be done painting the place and re-grouting some of that tile in the shower. I’ve already filed my new mailing address with the Postal Service, directed ConEd to activate the power and natural gas, and scheduled the mover for next Sunday, November 6, the earliest day he was available.

McDonald’s Corp. will start printing nutritional information on its packaging starting in February, according to a Reuters news story today. It will be similar to the Nutrition Facts tables found on packaged foods in stores, so consumers will be able to tell in a pig-eyed glance that they’ll be ingesting 47 percent of their total recommended daily fat intake by inhaling that Big Mac. It’s great to hear McDonald’s is taking this step, which I’m sure has absolutely nothing to do with building defenses for itself against tobacco industry-style litigation.

I’ve found an apartment! My application was fully approved today, I sign the lease Wednesday morning and I can move in November 1 or as early as this weekend.

It’s in Inwood, the northernmost tip of Manhattan, and my neighborhood is flanked to the west by Fort Tryon Park, home of the Cloisters, which I visited this summer, and to the east by High Bridge Park, where I toured the High Bridge Water Tower last October.

The apartment is a one-bedroom walkup on the fourth floor of a well-kept old building and my rent is more than $100 less per month than what I’m paying for my current place. I’ve got hardwood floors, a small hall at the entrance leading into a large main room with the kitchen area off to the side (“You could teach a dance class in here!” the hair-gelled broker kept blurting in his Long Island accent). The bedroom is at least as big as my current one and the bathroom has snaggle-toothed tile walls in the shower. In the two main rooms are windows overlooking the street, which is not a major thoroughfare and quiet. The building’s management is in the process of adding laundry services in the basement, which will be a nice bonus.

I’m told the landlord, who I’ll meet at the lease signing, is a six-foot-six Greek named Paul. I recall the landlord Andrew and I had in Lakewood, Ohio, who was also Greek and despite that ancient warning about accepting gifts, bore bottles of wine and giant trays of baklava to his tenants at Christmas. Maybe this guy will give out some nice holiday gifts, too.

The main beef you’ll get from people about Inwood is that it’s way on up there, Manhattan-wise. As a reference for non New Yorkers, I currently live on W. 85th Street, whereas my new place is on the equivalent of W. 196th Street. I expect my work commute to be lengthened by at least 15 minutes each way. A strong positive, however, is that I’m a few blocks away from a station of the A, which is an express train, delivers me directly to Penn Station for work nearby and has a song written after it (“Take the ‘A’ Train,” made famous by Duke Ellington). I’ll also have the option of taking the leisurely local train, the 1, which I know well.

But in true Jason fashion, the aspect of this new place that I enjoy the most is that it’s on Sickles Street. I researched the origin and discovered it’s named in dubious honor of Daniel E. Sickles, New York State Legislator and Major General during the Civil War. He’s shown in the center of the below photo, taken in the 1860s.

Dan was born in the city in 1819, studied law at NYU and served as a New York State Senator and Representative in Congress. It wasn’t until he turned 40 that he made his name, dueling with and killing Francis Scott Key’s son, who was having an affair with Dan’s frisky, 22-year-old wife, Teresa. (Dan himself enjoyed philandering, but these were days of different standards.) At Gettysburg, he defied a direct order, resulting in the loss of an entire corps of Union soldiers, as well as his right leg, which was crushed by an artillery round, amputated and now stands proudly on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine among fragments of Lincoln’s skull and Paul Revere’s dental tools.

It is, you will agree, a more entertaining history than that of W. 85th Street.

I’ve been seeking a new apartment for the past few weeks. This weekend brought some promising prospects, but I’m not writing about anything I really like until I’m 100 percent on an application. What I’ve discovered is that if there’s one thing guaranteed by apartment hunting, it’s a heady combination of entertainment and crushing frustration.

It seems brokers don’t much care for apartment seekers looking for places in the $1,000/month range, which is a pittance for Manhattan rents, just as much so for brokers’ commissions, which likely explains at least some of their communication failure. I had a devil of a time getting them to even bother returning my calls in a timely fashion, if at all. “But Jason,” you say, grasping my shoulder gently, “You need to follow up with your broker constantly.” No, I don’t. Fuck that. When I give someone who is offering a service a directive to enact that service, I expect him to do it without me having to call him thrice daily. Brokers are those slug-like aquarium creatures that affix themselves to the glass, spending their days sucking algae and shitting. And as the great Steve Newman of Zachary Confections once told me, “You know what brokers are? Ninety percent bullshit, 10 percent commission.”

Instead, I’ve been relying heavily on Craigslist. I still have to deal with brokers or agents, of course, but it’s better for them because they don’t actually have to do anything other than lie to me and still get paid if I take a place.

The most fun game to play on any apartment listing service is, “What information is being left out of the description?” If no mention is made of an elevator, it’s a walkup. If the building is not described as “quiet,” it will be teeming with NYU students on Daddy’s dollar. If a listing looks too good to be true, it either is, or it really is that good, but someone else just took it.

I checked out a grand, 125-year-old building in my current neighborhood, off Columbus Avenue. It was previously a hotel and has marvelously high ceilings, tall doors, hardwood floors and claw-foot cast-iron tubs. The problem was that for the high $1,200 monthly rent, I would have had only a bedroom and shared access to a kitchen and bathroom. The girl who was renting the room told me on the phone she ran her massage therapy business from the apartment, which explained the tight quarters. But when I stopped by the place and asked to see “the rest” of the apartment, I saw she had a room for her massaging, a “sitting room” that was more like a full living room, a room for an office and a bedroom with her own bath. It was a great setup, but if I’d have had to live there, it would have driven me mad that all these great rooms were right there but completely unaccessable to me, particularly for that rape of a rent. On the positive side, she had a quiet and friendly wire-haired Jack Russell Terrier named Jigsaw, whose hobby was chasing in-shell macadamia nuts around the floor. A nice touch, but not enough for me to want to take the place.

Another apartment-hunting greatest-hit was a studio on Sullivan Street, which has got to be one of the quietest streets in the West Villiage, and it’s right by Washington Square Park. Amusingly, right across the street was Peanut Butter & Co., a sandwich shop that slathers its homemade peanut butter on pretty much everything. Sadly, it was not meant to be, as the place was tiny and grubby and, regardless, some NYU student had sprinted off to an ATM so he could put a deposit down on the digs right then and there.

The search continues.

At Katie’s invitation, I joined her at the Chelsea Clearview Cinema tonight to watch The Squid and the Whale. The director, Brooklyn boy Noah Baumbach, was most recently recognized as the co-writer of Wes Anderson’s love-it-or-hate-it The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The guys are friends, the same age and seem to share a love of Manhattan and quirky senses of humor.

The biggest similarity between the two films is the speed, wit and near uncomfortable deadpan directness of the dialogue. People curse at themselves, at each other, and say cruel things to each other.

In Baumbach’s film, such qualities make more sense, because he doesn’t share Anderson’s obsession with colorful minor characters, among other painstakingly crafted set dressings. The Squid and the Whale is quirky but realistic.

Jeff Daniels is amazing as a self-obsessed, washed-up author relegated to teaching creative writing classes and spouting emotionless book-knowledge about great works of literature. He’s good enough that I think I can remember him now for this role and not the one I’ve associated him with for the past 10 years: his jackass role in Dumb and Dumber.

Laura Linney is strong and smarter than Daniels’ character (and a more successful writer, to his disgruntlement). They separate and share the kids and she’s infinitely more forgiving and understanding that any other human would rightly be with the brood of idiot man-children that surround her (including a love interest of hers, a tennis pro played by Billy Baldwin, who looks like he wandered over drunk from his conversion van).

Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline are great as the family’s sons rife with painfully embarrassing and awkward adolescent emotions and actions. I only read afterwards that the movie is autobiographical, with Eisenberg’s character substituting for Baumbach’s as a child. Good grief that there was really ever a family as dysfunctional as this one, although there may be some artistic license at work.

Eisenberg wants to be accepted by his father to a degree that he finds himself repeating Dad’s vapid views on literature without even realizing it, referring at one point to “The Metamorphosis” as Kafkaesque, until his girlfriend gently points out that’s because Kafka wrote it. He pilfers a song from Pink Floyd’s The Wall as his own acoustic guitar composition during a talent show at his school. The movie comes to an abrupt end as he realizes what and who are important in his life. The suddenness at first irritated me, until I realized it was a craftily direct way to avoid the inevitable “boy sets off on road to young manhood to move on/fulfill his dreams/get the girl/etc.” scene.

Finally, New York movies filmed here (and not Vancouver) make me happy. Sets include Park Slope, Central Park, many subway trains and stations, and the American Museum of Natural History, a certain exhibit in which gives the film its title and key plot point.

Post-movie, we scuttled a few doors down to Burritoville for dinner. I got the same nachos I did last time and Katie got the Bob Marley jerk-chicken burrito, which suffered from some buckshot-like semicooked rice. After the cold rain died down, we stayed on 23rd and had drinks at East of Eighth. The bartender was new or in a generous mood, as my Glenlivet was served in a drinking glass, filled to the halfway mark.

After work, I went downtown to City Hall, an American restaurant in Tribeca on Duane Street¹ for some festivities with Jimi and his friends. If you’re a besuited middle-aged white businessman, this is your restaurant. But then, if you are, you probably already knew that, because the place was packed with ’em, making me feel like a potato-sacked hillbilly for not wearing a collared shirt.

Lots of rich wood paneling, track lighting and, lining the walls near the ceiling, backlit photos of historical New York street life, including several by Berenice Abbott.

Appetizers were plenty, including garlicky vegetable trays of pickles, carrots, celery, radishes, pickled tomatoes and olives, then there were dinner rolls and deep-fried onion strings. Whether our waiter was biding his time or it was just the regular way of things, the time it took to get our menus, and then our food after ordering, was glacial: literally two hours to get our menus, then another hour and a half for the food.

Several folks ordered the “High Rise of Shellfish,” a tower of oysters, clams, mussels, crab, shrimp, lobster and some other mysterious-looking crustaceans. I tried the grilled hanger steak, served with balsamic onions and drenched in port butter for extra heart-stopping richness, and served with one of those small piles of mystery greens that I’m never certain are there merely for decoration or are truly meant to be eaten.

I had a few forkfuls of Jimi’s dessert, which was red velvet cake, a treat I’ve always wanted to try. Tastes like butter. And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the secret just a cup or so of red food coloring?

Afterwards, the group, which contained several well-dressed handsome gay men, decided to watch some go-go boys at a midtown club. I was informed that the difference between go-go boys and all-out strippers is that there’s no fucking around, as it were, with the go-go boys removing any clothing: they emerge fully clothed in a thong or some other sort of prurient undergarment, or perhaps nothing whatsoever. At any rate, I decided this jolly aspect of the evening wasn’t for me, so I bid the guys adieu.

City Hall

• 131 Duane St. (Between Church and West Broadway)
• (212) 227-7777
• Meal 29 of 52: grilled hanger steak ($25).

¹ Trivia Time: Just south of Duane Street is Reade Street. In 1960, that New York drugstore chain took its name from the two streets, which bounded its warehouse. [back]

After a tiresome workday, I enjoyed Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. As I suspected, I found it cracking good fun, having liked writer/director Nick Park’s previous outings with wily inventor/cheese aficionado Wallce and his faithful/exasperated dog Gromit: the trio of shorts A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave.

I predicted there could be strain stretching the duo’s adventures to feature length, but the movie doesn’t flag, plunging right into the world of Wallace’s Rube Goldberg inventions and his newest business venture protecting his town’s vegetables against rabbits. On a moonlit night, something goes horribly awry in the lab, bringing rise to the dreaded Were-Rabbit, a giant fuzzy lummox with a polka-dot bow tie and an insatiable appetite for fresh produce.

Much physical comedy (the best is the bit with the hairpiece), plentiful British humour, wild car and plane chases, some welcome pokes at the clergy, plenty of in-references for fans of Wallace & Gromit’s previous adventures, childish in-jokes for the adults in the audience (involving melons and nuts), and some classic British caricatures in the gun-loving fop Victor Quartermaine (voiced by Ralph Fiennes) and the carrot-haired apple of Wallace’s eye, Lady Campanula Tottington (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter).

The traditional Plasticine animation is still painstakingly poky to produce; according to the IMDb, the film took five years to produce, with animators averaging three seconds of usable footage per day. This time around, it’s supplemented with some seamless computer animation, including animated smoke, fire, fog and hovering bunnies. But I still like that handspun molded clay movement, with its shifts and lags, the animators’ fingerprints often still visible on the surface of the characters.

Writing about eBooks last month, I asked “where’s my ultra-thin, wave-of-the-future folding LCD screen?” Well, it was introduced today. It’s not LCD, but it mimics that technology while sidestepping the issues of bulk, inflexibility and energy consumption.

The as-yet-unnamed display panel is a joint venture of LG.Philips LCD and E Ink Corp. and billed as the first “tablet-size flexible electronic paper display.” It has a 10.1-inch diagonal and is 0.01 inches thick, about as thin and as flexible as a sheet of construction paper; it can literally be rolled up and stored in a pocket or a bag.

It stays so slim in part because it works without power or a backlight. Instead, tiny “ink”-containing capsules, each about half the width of a strand of hair, switch between black and white depending on whether they are positively or negatively charged. The result is a crisp 600x800 resolution at 100 pixels per inch with four levels of grayscale; in layman’s terms, that’s “a lot like newsprint,” according to one report.

This underlying positive/negative display technology is already used in an eBook reader introduced in Japan in the summer of 2004, the Sony Librié.

On the positive side, the Librié is portable—at seven ounces and 8x5 inches, it’s roughly book-sized. It runs on four AAA batteries, instead of proprietary, difficult-to-replace ones like certain other devices. Navigation is simple, with page-forward and page-backward buttons and the ability to digitally “bookmark” up to 40 pages. It has bells and whistles like magnification, a dictionary and a voice-reader.

But the Librié still most closely resembles a large PDA, not an ultra-thin flexible book, and when it debuted last year, it cost $380, which is steep for a single-use portable electronic device. Worse, although several hundred eBooks are available through a Sony-funded download service in Japan for only $3 each, DRM built into the Librié renders them useless after 60 days. It wasn’t clear to me from the reviews I’ve read of the device, but I’d bet the Librié doesn’t accept books in standard pdf or html formats. (Although as for Sony’s PlayStation Portable, I’d also wager there are hacks aplenty for the Librié.)

It will be interesting to see what becomes of the Philips/E Ink technology. I wonder how much bulkier and less flexible such a display panel will become once a CPU, storage device and user interface are necessarily added.

My friend Tina, who moved to Florida recently, was in town on business, so I stopped by to visit her, appropriately enough for a toy inventor/designer, at the International Toy Center, a two-building complex at 200 Fifth Avenue and 1107 Broadway connected by an enclosed pedestrian bridge on the 9th floor.

The 1107 Broadway segment was built in 1911, and at 16 stories tall, was one of the highest buildings in New York. (This record means little as it was being broken rapidly at the time; the nearby 21-story Flatiron Building, for instance, was completed in 1915.) But the timing coincided with an influx of German toy manufacturers to the U.S. prior to and during World War I, shifting the industry from a European one to an American one by the end of World War II. By then, most toy companies were headquartered in the Madison Square area and New York was the toy capital of the world.

Of course, that’s far from the truth today. Lately, the building has served as temporary showroom and office space for toy manufacturers and suppliers in town for the Toy Industry Association’s trade shows held every October and February at the Javits Center, the International Halloween Show and the American International Toy Fair.

Then, in January, real estate developer The Chetrit Group bought the complex for about $360 million with plans to turn it into apartments starting early next year. (In March, a similar fate hit the 1 Madison Avenue complex located across Madison Square Park from the Toy Center. SL Green Realty Corp. bought it for $918 million and plans to convert its signature 50-story building, topped with a clock tower modeled after the one at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, into luxury condominiums.)

When I checked in with the security guard in the Toy Center lobby, telling him I was there to see Tina in 1510, he squinted at me like I was an idiot. I saw why after I got off the fancy elevator (depicted above): the building now is mostly vacant in preparation for the gutting. I passed bank after bank of deserted offices, the sound of my footsteps echoing off the walls as I walked down the unlit hallway. I saw through some windows that the adjoining Toy Center building was empty, too. Tina had a small, unfurnished office in the back that she was using as a showroom for a new project and with all the packaging and the samples and prototypes of toys strewn about the room, it looked as if a children’s birthday party had exploded.

We headed out to a simple little restaurant with cozy booths, Mustang Sally’s, a block away from the Fashion Institute of Technology, and frequented by Tina during her time there. It was halfway decent, with a standard salad, sandwich and steak menu. I had a burger and fries, which were rather costly. Tina had the salmon and shrimp Caesar salad, which she said was tasty.

Parting at Penn Station, Tina gave me her paperback copy of The Inner Circle by T.C. Boyle. Because she’s on the Long Island Railroad much of her time in New York, she reads a lot and shockingly revealed to me that sometimes, as she finishes reading a page, will tear it from the book, so by the end, all that remains is a limp cover with a jagged paper spine. Less to carry that way, she explained. I was glad such a fate didn’t fall Inner Circle because so far, it’s a good read, even with the shrieking infant on the 1 train and his father who shouted shut up! enough that even the jaded New Yorkers were getting a little shifty in their seats.

Mustang Sally’s

• 324 Seventh Avenue (at W. 28th Street)
• (212) 695-3806
• Meal 28 of 52: Mustang Burger ($9.95) with sautéed mushrooms ($1.50 extra), fries ($3.95) and a Diet Coke ($2.75).

I watched Layer Cake tonight on DVD only to read online afterwards that the star of that film, Daniel Craig, had been picked on Friday to be the new James Bond.

Initially, he seems an odd choice for an action hero or Bond, with his blank, broad-featured face and thinning blonde hair not styled in any particularly foppish way. But then you notice he has blue eyes that can cut diamonds and speaks in a British tone that’s the vocal equivalent of something that would taste sweet, rich and creamy when spread on toast. The obligatory shirtless scene offers a fine preview to ladies and gentlemen of a certain persuasion, as it’s a chest that will likely be showcased often in the Bond role, as is required.

As for Layer Cake, aside from having a daft title and no bankable American stars, it’s a shame that it’s a not-too-bad British crime drama, because any such film will inevitably get compared, derisively or otherwise, to Guy Ritchie’s work. In fact, Layer Cake is billed not only as “from the producers of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” but Ritchie himself was reportedly on-board to direct at one point.

Then you’ve got the cutesy pseudonyms the characters are required to have by Richie’s Law, like Duke, Slasher, Clarkie, Slavo and Kinky, and the Richie-requisite crazy camerawork, including seamless transitions from one scene to another via a zoom, shots up sides of buildings, from helecopters and up through the bottom of a glass-topped table. Also, a hip soundtrack mixing electronica with British pop new and old (Joe Cocker, Starsailor, XTC, the Cult) and the necessarily Ironic Track (the cheerfully woeful “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran, which plays as one character is beaten into a coma.)

As the film opens, Craig’s unnamed character is sitting pretty as a cocaine-trade middleman, one with a very careful and composed attitude toward his job. As he describes the hierarchy of the trade, we’re introduced to the muscle, the lackeys, the young turks, the kingpin, the loose cannons and the users. Craig announces his intentions to get out of the racket, but these plans rapidly dissolve as he’s ensnared in a complicated mission to retrieve a million stolen ecstasy pills. There’s crosses and double-crosses, deals and hits gone wrong. Craig gets the crap beat out of him by one of his own men, then sits down with him afterwards for a whiskey.

All said, an entertaining popcorn flick. But will Craig end up a Lazenby or a Connery? We’ll just have to wait next year for Casino Royale.

Hell’s bells, what was going on in my old hometown of Toledo yesterday?

A group of neo-nazis decide that a fine way to spread their message would be to march against “black criminal behavior” through a predominantly black neighborhood. The march gets cancelled at the last minute but a group of nazis shows up anyway with some chanting and signs along the lines of “White People Unite!” Crowds of at least 500, “mainly male gang members in their 20s,” according to Toledo mayor Jack Ford, turn out to protest. They end up skirmishing with cops, pelting them with bottles and rocks, while setting some buildings and cars on fire for good measure. Police counter with tear gas, rubber bullets and more than 60 arrests.

You think you’re tough? Try bathing in icy cold water for a few days and we’ll see how tough you really are, chief.

On Thursday, a green paper notice from ConEd appeared taped to the foyer door of my apartment building, noting that because of an unsafe pressure reading, they had shut down the boiler as a precaution. Days later and still no word from our landlord on when he might be thinking of getting it fixed and turned back on.

Despite conventional wisdom, I’ve found my hair and at least most of my body really can get clean with cold water and soap, although there was a lot of gasping and uncontrollable shaking as my temperature dropped 10 degrees and I felt that perhaps I would have a heart attack. But as the old saw goes, nobody likes a greasy Jason, so I had to suck it up and bathe quickly with my body all contorted and atremble.

I’ve found the one bathroom duty I just can’t or won’t do with cold water is shave. I have bristly, Instagrow facial hair that you can grate Parmesan with after a few days, and shaving in cold water with a beard like that—I might as well pull it from my face with duct tape. So I boiled a kettle of water and poured it in the sink for shaving, just like on Little House on the Prairie.

Hot water, I want you back in my life.

Last month in Daily Variety, I read about Fox launching Skating with Celebrities, a knockoff of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. Skating will pair pro skaters with C-list celebrities such as Todd Bridges of Diff’rent Strokes, singer Debbie Gibson, and Dave Coulier of Full House.

Yet somehow, I don’t think the show will be as exciting and original as the series these titles seem to be mimicking, whether in name, subject matter or both. I’m referring to actor/musician John Lurie’s great Fishing with John, which ran in 1992 for only six episodes. But what a run it was.

The concept was for Lurie to join one of his friends in an exotic location, then fish, while the impetus was to fulfill his dream of “threatening to do a fishing show for a long time,” write off vacations, and exact revenge. In the first episode, for instance, he invites director Jim Jarmusch to fish for shark off of Montauk, knowing Jarmusch gets seasick, but chiefly, as Lurie notes on the show’s DVD commentary track, to “repay him for Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law,” in which Jarmusch directed Lurie.

Lurie also fishes with Tom Waits in Jamaica, Dennis Hopper in Thailand, Matt Dillon in Costa Rica, and Willem Dafoe in northern Maine. In the show’s most obvious and ironic joke, the men rarely catch anything. (Lurie later claimed the trip with Jarmusch netted four maco sharks but that the cameraman was too busy vomiting over the side of the boat to capture it on film.)

So instead, Lurie and his guests talk a lot. Lurie, who never claimed he was producing anything grander than poorly edited “home movies,” relishes in capturing the ridiculousness of this mostly unscripted banter.

”So what are the great fish movies?” Jarmusch asks as they set off from shore. There’s a pause, then both he and Lurie answer simultaneously, “Jaws,” then just stand there.

Dafoe, who says the best thing about ice fishing is that “it’s filled with possibility,” helps Lurie build a makeshift wooden hut on a frozen lake and, turning in for the night, suggests they share a sleeping bag to conserve warmth. “You’re making me really nervous,” Lurie chuckles, while keeping an eye on him. “You know what, I get kind of sweet when it comes to bedtime,” Dafoe laughs.

The conversations are complemented by narration from voiceover professional Robb Webb, who’s now best known as the voice behind the clicking-stopwatch promos for 60 Minutes. He serves up an equal number of facts about fish that are outright lies and non-sequiturs. “I’d love a bite of your sandwich!” he says at one point, apropos of nothing, and when Waits puts a fish in his pants, he deadpans, “Oh my god.” Or he’s serving up some mock-documentary commentary in all seriousness. A few minutes before reporting that Lurie and Dafoe have died of starvation during their trip, Webb solemnly intones, “The situation is growing serious. John and Willem have consumed only melted snow since their supply of cheese crackers ran out two days ago.”

Lurie’s show wasn’t built to last. The material was ahead of its time and, regardless, after the first few episodes, his funding had dried up from Telecom Japan, which had only agreed to fund the project because it was desperate for a U.S. television investment, only to find that it had absolutely no idea what to make of it.

Fishing With John was about “real men, doing real things,” according to one Webb voiceover, and I think that if today’s realty shows weren’t as predictable and suffused with their own sense of greatness, and more like John, I’d be watching more TV.

With Apple rolling out its first iPods that can play video, methods to get one’s own copy-protected digital video (such as TV show episodes, music videos or whole movies from DVD) onto the iPod have been a hot topic, with a nice guide published by Mark Pilgrim making the rounds yesterday.

I’m late to the Digital Video Illegalities craze, so this was new to me. I tried Pilgrim’s guide on an episode of The Simpsons and was able to copy it, de-protect it and smoosh it down to an 80MB mp4 video file, which is convenient enough to store and view on my PowerBook. This technique could be handy to rip many episodes or whole movies for watching during travel and I’d imagine it could conserve battery power by sidestepping the computer’s power-intensive DVD drive.

From this, I decided to investigate how to dub an entire DVD movie. This technology has been around for years, although at least on the Mac, was incredibly time consuming and required a half-dozen shoddily coded programs. The process is now somewhat faster, if only because computers are too, but still requires three different programs, perhaps because an all-in-one DVD ripper would be immediately suspect and crushed by Harvey Weinstein’s bare hands.

Here’s the three-step process I took to back-up a copy of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. With the built-in DVD player/burner on my 1 GHz PowerBook G4, each step took about 30 minutes. If you have an Apple computer with Mac OS X and a DVD burner, you can follow along.

1. Use the charmingly named freeware program MacTheRipper to remove the DVD’s copy protection and copy the movie to your computer’s hard drive. A useful setting copies only the main feature, skipping all previews, menus and extras.
2. Use a video compressor such as DVD2one (which is also available for Windows) to generate a copy of the movie on your hard drive with a much smaller file size. This step, which is akin to ripping mp3s from audio CDs, is necessary because the commercial-grade DVD on which the original movie resides holds a lot more data than the off-the-shelf 4.7GB recordable DVD that will store the copy. In fact, DVD2one automatically compresses the movie’s video (it doesn’t compress the audio at all) just enough so the whole movie will fit on a recordable DVD.
3. Burn the compressed movie files from your hard drive onto a recordable DVD using a commercial CD/DVD-burning program such as Toast or Apple’s own Disk Utility.

My Mac played the copy without issue, but the true test would be if my trusty eight-year-old Sony DVD player would play it. It did, launching into the Focus Films logo, then the movie itself, as soon as I inserted the DVD. I didn’t notice any difference in the video quality between the copy and the original, although I admit that Sunshine isn’t the ideal test case, as most of the movie seems to have been shot on digital video.

Ben Sherman just signed a lease for a 4,650-square-foot retail store at 96 Spring Street in SoHo, according to a press release I received today at work.

I’m happy to hear this because the clothing brand is one of my favorites. It’s the fourth-largest casual-wear label in the UK, but this will be its first ever retail store in the U.S. when it opens next Spring.

Ben Sherman is known chiefly here for its sassy, wide-collared, very often striped and slim-fitting button-down shirts favored by gentlemen such as myself. Here I am wearing one and aping for one of Andie’s trademark hold-the-candle-in-the-bar photos.

The irony is that I’ve been pining for such a store in Manhattan for some time, but have since discovered that discount retail chains here, particularly Filene’s and Century 21, stock small selections of the notoriously costly brand and price them at cut rates. Hopefully the store in SoHo will have a sale rack.

This is just a nerd post to remind myself of a solution to a Movable Type problem I was having. Hey, if you use MT, maybe it’ll help you, too.

You know how when you’re editing your blog and you click the “Entries” button and only the 20 most-recent entries are listed by default? Well, as I go through my phase of correctly categorizing my entries, I want all entries listed by default, so I don’t have to keep manually selecting the “all entries” option from the pull-down menu at the bottom of the entries-list screen.

To do this, at least in Movable Type version 3.15, go to your MT directory and download the file named CMS.pm located in the lib/MT/App/ folder. (CMS, by the way, stands for Content Management System.) Fire up your trusty text editor (I swear by BBEdit) and change line 2361 from

my $limit = $q->param('limit') || 20;

to

my $limit = $q->param('limit') || 'none';

If you’re using a different but recent version of Movable Type, you should be able open that same file and do a find for the line

my $limit = $q->param('limit') || 20;

until you come across the one that’s nested in a code-block named “sub list_entries,” then change it to

my $limit = $q->param('limit') || 'none';

Save the file, upload and replace, and relaunch MT. There you have it. Why Movable Type can’t simply make this a preference, I have no idea.

Do you recall that industrial real estate conference I went to about a month ago in Long Beach, California? I was reminded when the digital contact sheets from our event photographer arrived today. That’s right: Look who got snapped making a speaker introduction. You know, I thought I remember a paparazzo flash interrupting my concentration.

Adjust that mike and stand up straighter, son! At least I’m attempting to make eye contact with the audience, although it appears to be of the Medusa sort.

Looks like New York got punk’d by Iraq on the whole subway-specific terror threat on Friday, according to news from CNN this afternoon (“Sources: Tip on N.Y. Subway Threat a Hoax,” by Kelli Arena):

Information that led to heightened security for the New York City transit system was a hoax, government sources said Tuesday.

The sources said an informant in Iraq who provided the tip had told investigators about a terrorist plot involving New York’s subway system. That informant admitted he gave false information, the sources said.

I suppose Iraq is entitled to give us some good-natured ribbing of this sort, especially so close to the tricks and treats of Halloween, and we did kind of start it with that whole invade-their-country thing.

But might I suggest Los Angeles get picked on next time? Look, they’re a huge, all-American city rife with landmarks and symbolism, and populated by infidels and smug twats, just like New York, only with tans and better teeth. How about some terror over there next time? We could all use a rest here.

I watched Born Into Brothels tonight on DVD, the movie that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature this year.

The film’s director and writer, Zana Briski, a London-born photographer based in New York City, was documenting the lives of prostitutes in Calcutta’s red light district in the late ’90s when she became enamored with the women’s children who live there, typically confined to the house to clean and run errands. They’re often beaten and cursed, and when men visit their mothers or sisters, the kids play on the streets or go up to the rooftops to fly kites.

Briski gives them cameras and teaches them photography. The best of them have a perceptive fearlessness that allows them to take amazing photos serving as documents of both the squalor and the joy in their lives. Briski, who the children call “Auntie,” arranges trips to a zoo and the sea, where they frolic and take more photos.

Aware that without education, the kids will fall by the wayside or turn to prostitution themselves, she tries to get them enrolled in schools. The paperwork-intensive process is a nightmare of bureaucracy and caste—children of parents with criminal records can find it nearly impossibly to get schooling in India.

To raise money, she exhibits the children’s photos, both in India and in Manhattan. In one of the movie’s most surreal scenes, the children gleefully watch videos of New York art patrons, sipping champagne in a gallery and musing thoughtfully over the professionally mounted and framed photos taken by the kids.

Briski is able to place most of the children in boarding schools, although the obligatory “where are they now” text overlays at the movie’s conclusion show that several of them dropped out or were pulled out by their parents. But she hasn’t given up. In 2002, Briski founded Kids with Cameras, a non-profit organization to continue teaching photography to Calcutta’s kids.

For my second day of Open House New York, I decided to hit the cemeteries in the East Village. Cemeteries in Manhattan? There used to be many—Houston Street was once lined with them, I’m told. But as the city sprawled, many plots were relocated and by the nineteenth century, legislation forbade further cemetery development in Manhattan.

But a small handful of the originals survive and, surprisingly, are still active, like the New York Marble Cemetery. Located on Second Avenue between E. 2nd and E. 3rd Streets, it’s billed as “the first non-sectarian burial place in New York City open to the public.”¹

If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a courtyard. There’s a handsome iron gate set at the entrance and high mortar-and-stone walls boxing in the plot, city buildings just beyond looming on all sides. It’s a rectangular, grassy half-acre featuring shrubbery, trees and that vaguely surreal air of rural environments in urban settings. When I walked in, some guy was throwing a twig around, playing fetch with his dog.

The first burial in the cemetery was in 1830 and, to date, it contains the remains of 2,060 people, although the most recent burial was in 1937. But if you can prove you’re a descendant of any of the dead, you can be buried there, too. Ever the city of real estate, in order to save space and speed decay, you can’t be interred in any earthly container, whether it’s a ceramic urn or a coffin. To further conserve, there are no headstones. Instead, imbedded in the walls framing the cemetery are blocks of marble engraved with the family name and dates of death. Time and the environment haven’t been kind to these stone plaques, which now resemble limestone, the carved surfaces like the face of a worn penny.

Directly in front of each plaque and ten feet underground, the bodies are burried. They’re not interred in catacombs, as I had thought, but sealed in marble vaults the size of small rooms that can only be accessed by a gravedigger.

The marble cemeteries had fallen into disuse as recently as five years ago, overgrown with weeds and littered with garbage, and the surrounding walls had caved in spots. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission bestowed landmark status and therefore protection from beady-eyed real estate developers and other such vandals. But the designation also imposed new challenges, according to the guides who were on-hand to answer our questions. (Most-asked question: “Are people buried in the walls?”) Everything must be approved and done in a very specific way. One of the collapsed walls, for example, had to be rebuilt the “right way,” by an old-world mason, who was required to consult a “before” photo of the wall and put every stone back where it originally was.

The savvy cemetery personnel have devised clever ways to generate additional cash to fund this meticulous and costly upkeep. They recently rented out the cemetery for a wedding ceremony and they’re also letting people throw cocktail receptions and community theater events there. The only restrictions are nothing at night (there’s no electricity) and nothing on Halloween (they don’t want to project “that kind of image”).

¹ Confusingly, the New York Marble Cemetery has a “sister” cemetery, located a block away on E. 2nd Street between First and Second Avenues, called the New York City Marble Cemetery, but the two don’t seem to be associated officially. The New York City Marble Cemetery’s claim to fame is that President James Monroe was buried there from 1831 until 1857, when his home state of Virginia got bitter and had the body dug up and returned. [back]

Once upon a time a little lighthouse was built on a sharp point of the shore by the Hudson River. It was round and fat and red. It was fat and red and jolly. And it was very, very proud. Behind it lay New York City where the people lived....

Hildegarde H. Swift, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Big Grey Bridge, (1942)

Like last year, I was determined to take advantage of Open House New York, which for one weekend a year offers free tours of New York’s monuments, museums, private residences, churches and other landmark and historically significant structures.

Unlike last year when the weather was gorgeous, it was cold and incessantly rainy all weekend. But I had already decided earlier in the week where I wanted to go for the Open House, so I packed my provisions and set out for the Little Red Lighthouse, taking the A train up to W. 181st Street to stop by Fort Washington Park.

Known officially as the Jeffrey’s Hook Lighthouse, the vibrant red beacon was erected in 1880, but it wasn’t until 1921 that it was moved to its current location and shone its light to prevent freighters from dashing against the shore.

When the George Washington Bridge was completed in 1931, it took over lighting the way for the Hudson River’s mariners. Convinced the bridge was a worthy substitute, the Coast Guard deactivated the lowly lighthouse in 1947 and was ready to dismantle and sell it until a public campaign intervened. At the heart of the efforts was Hildegarde H. Swift’s children’s book, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Big Grey Bridge, which I’m told native New Yorkers of a certain age have a strong memory of and affinity for.

Thanks to the public outcry, the Little Red Lighthouse is still lit and is now the only one left in Manhattan. In the fall, a festival features tours of the light, a reading of the book, photo displays and food.

Seeing it for the first time, I was struck by how incongruous it is to see such a squat little thing sitting under the massive aluminum-colored cable-and-steel-beam bridge.

Through the front door, a tightly winding iron staircase elevates you to a landing where you can peer through the lighthouse’s portals. You can then take a very steep ladder through the ceiling, very nearly cracking your head on something blunt and rust-colored, to the tip where the light is kept. Crouching through a square hatch in the side, you emerge onto the narrow balcony at the top. The view wouldn’t be described as spectacular, as the lighthouse is probably only about 25 feet high, but it’s a strange and wondrous vantage point nonetheless.

It was a dark and stormy night, and sitting at my table at Djerdan, an old-world Balkan restaurant in the Garment District, I kept imagining a spy resembling Alan Arkin, clad in a long gray overcoat, stumbling through the door, grazed by a bullet and grasping a rain-spotted manila envelope. “For the love of the republic, get this microfilm to Hasad,” he would rasp, pressing it into my hand. Then, before collapsing in a wet heap on the cracked tile floor, he would add, “Try the burek. It’s quite good.”

Well, Alan would be right. Homemade burek, a specialty at Djerdan, are large, flat slices of phyllo pie stuffed with spinach and cheese or ground beef. I tried the spinach variety and ordered some Turkish coffee that was strong enough to support my coffeespoon upright, as the bottom of the cup contained, I discovered upon draining it, a sludgy, mudlike layer of fine grounds.

Continuing my phyllo feast, I got a thick wedge of moist Baklava that had something like 30 flaky layers. Not only was it tasty, the desserts menu contains a full dozen intriguing-sounding choices, from tulumba and hurmasica, to oblanda and cupavac.

Consulting the menu while listening to the rowdy 20-somethings a few tables down speak rapidly in a thick, tangled Eastern European language, I noted that other specialties at Djerdan include beef goulash, stuffed cabbage and peppers and traditional veal dishes, including soup and kabobs. Good, hearty food, and cheap, too. They’re open for lunch and just a street down from where I work in Midtown. Tastily convenient!

Djerdan

• 221 W. 38th St. (between Seventh and Eighth Avenues)
• (212) 921-1183
• Meal 27 of 52: spinach burek ($4.95), Turkish coffee ($2.50) and baklava ($3.95).

President Bush told two high-ranking Palestinian officials that he had been told by God to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and then create a Palestinian state to bring peace to the Middle East, they recall during a documentary on Middle East peace that airs next week in Britain.

“President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God,’” said Nabil Shaath, who was the Palestinian foreign minister at the time of a top-level meeting with Bush in June 2003. [....]

“God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq ...’ And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.’ And by God I’m gonna do it,” Shaath quotes the president as saying [...].

From an article by Matthew Kalman in today’s San Francisco Chronicle (emphasis added)

For the first time, according to media reports, terrorists have directly targeted New York City’s subway system with threats of a bombing, possibly one modeled on those that took place in London this summer. Here’s a summary from an article in today’s Times (“New York Named in Terror Threat Against Subways,” by William K. Rashbaum):

Information about the threat, the officials said, came to light last weekend from an intelligence source who told federal authorities that the three men in Iraq had planned to meet with other operatives in New York.

One official said the group would number about a dozen. Another official said the total was closer to 20 people involved. The men planned to use strollers, briefcases and packages to hide a number of bombs that they planned to detonate on the subways.

“It was a conspiracy involving more than a dozen people aimed at delivering a number of devices into the subway,” one of the officials said.

The attack could happen as early as today or later this month, the officials added. Mayor Bloomberg announced at a press conference yesterday that he was immediately stepping up security, including the random bag searches implemented in July, and told New Yorkers to keep on straphangin’ but to be watchful for any suspicious activity. “If you see something, say something,” he repeated.

On the other hand, Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, labeled the threat “specific but noncredible” and said there are no plans to alter the threat level either in New York or the nation. The Los Angeles Times even quoted him today as having said, “The intelligence community has concluded this intelligence is of doubtful credibility.” What? Let’s get on the same page, politicos. Now I’m left to wonder if Bloomie’s announcement wasn’t at least in part politically motivated, kind of like our current presidential administration’s shenanigans with the national, color-coded terror alert system.

Lunchtime Update: Oh, great, a bomb scare at Penn Station. According to AFX News, law enforcement officials in biohazard suits, National Guard troops and police with bomb-sniffing dogs were called in this morning to investigate a suspicious substance that had been reported in a soft-drink can near an Amtrak ticketing area. It turned out to be a Drano-like liquid: a false alarm. I also just read that Bloomberg made a show of taking the subway to work this morning, in a gesture to reassure us commuters; hey, I got your gesture right here, buddy. Finally, police are now telling commuters here for the first time to refrain from bringing along backpacks, baby strollers, briefcases or bags, all of which could be used to hide explosives. I think I’ll sigh and walk home from work today.

Having written in August about the music industry’s laughable efforts to copy protect its CDs against evildoers, I was amused by a Reuters article published Tuesday in Billboard, which reports that at least one music label is telling its consumers how to circumvent its own protection.

Turns out some iPod users that purchase protected CDs from Sony BMG are miffed that they can’t rip mp3s. When they complain to the company, it directs them to a webpage on its own site detailing how to sidestep the protection.

What’s more, according to the article, bands with protected CDs such as the Foo Fighters and Dave Matthews Band, “are telling fans how they can beat the system.” In at least one case, they’re doing this via posts on fan sites, supplying links to CDex, a program that disables audio CD protection.

Meanwhile, an article in today’s New York Times (“My Songs, My Format,” by Seán Captain), not only details the limitations of Apple’s proprietary AAC format (which is the format of all tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store and the default “rip” setting in iTunes), it mentions and offers a link for Hymn, a program that removes copy protection from such tracks.

Like Paris Hilton, the Shake Shack was born and bred in New York City but continues to confound and enrapture with an inexplicably meteoric rise to fame.

There are other Hilton connections; trust me as I break it down.

First, when you peel back the superficial glitz and fame, you see the Shake Shack is a simpleton of the food world—it’s a glorified burger stand.

But then there’s the pedigree. The Shack’s founder, celebrity chef Danny Meyer, also birthed and owns the storied Union Square Cafe, the Gramercy Tavern and one of my favorite BBQ joints, Blue Smoke, among five other restaurants in the city.

Then you’ve got more celebrity and a dash of controversy with conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. Sol doesn’t have anything directly to do with the Shack, but he erected his most recent installation, Circle with Towers, smack dab on the periphery of the Shack’s main eating area. In appreciation, Shack customers sit on the artwork’s concrete-block ring, an inviting three feet high and 25 feet in diameter.

You’ve got the primo real estate connection. As if being nestled snug in the southeast corner of Madison Square Park wasn’t enough, the Shack is also about a block from the Flatiron Building in one direction and, in the other, the business and social titans of Madison and Park Avenues.

You’ve got the adoring public queuing up and wanting more, and you’ve got the media with its ever-flowing coverage of the adoring public. This ranges from Owen Phillips’ snotty directive in The New Yorker that “the Shack needs to get rid of some fans if it’s going to survive. No burger stand can handle this kind of volume,” to Rob Patronite’s exhortation in New York magazine that despite his 37 minute and 8 second wait on line, he had nothing but “an emphatic yes for the best burger in town.”

So what about the burgers? They’re very good. I think the not-so-secret secret is that they’re made with a blend of fresh-ground sirloin and brisket. I ordered the Shack Burger, a “single-sized” American cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato and Russian dressing-like sauce, and the meat had a tang of added-saltiness and was still pink and juicy in the middle, surprising in this bacteria-busting age. When I bit into the thing, I felt like Jules tucking into his Big Kahuna burger in Pulp Fiction. I also quickly wished I would have ordered two. My 16-ounce chocolate shake was thick and rich and I don’t know what kind of ice cream they use, but it had one of the most realistic, non-bombastic cocoa flavors I’ve ever tasted. Great stuff!

And what do I think of the Shake Shack’s fame? No problem. I think it deserves it, and more importantly, it didn’t deter from my eating experience. The prices are reasonable for the area. The crowd’s comprised not of solid tourists, as I would have thought, but chiefly of giddy teenagers, as well as adults who looked as if they worked in the area and that getting a burger there was the highlight of their day; it was for me, particularly after the hour-and-a-half long work meeting I had on Park Avenue at 4:00 p.m. As for the line, it’s a great equalizer and makes it a joy to people-watch and scrutinize the extensive menu—they have Purple Cows! And deep-fried portobello mushrooms as burger toppings! Those who tremble over the excessive lunch lines need to suck it up come back later. At 5:45 p.m., my wait was only about 10 minutes and the place is open until 11 p.m. daily. But it’s only open seasonally, and when the cold weather sets in for good, the Shack closes for winter, so get on down there.

Shake Shack

• Madison Square Park (at E. 23rd Street)
• (212) 889-6600
• Meal 26 of 52: Shack Burger ($4.50) and regular-sized chocolate shake ($4.00).

New York City found the Census Bureau’s most recent headcount last year to be suspiciously lacking, so it had the Department of City Planning challenge the figure using an alternate counting method that shows the link between the city’s booming housing market and increased population.

Looking at more than births, deaths and migration, the city researched telephone and utility records, property tax bills and building permits to “find” an additional 64,259 New Yorkers, brining the city’s total population to 8,168,338, the highest it’s ever been. The Bureau agreed to accept the new total, which also represents a 2% population growth in the city since the 2000 Census.

Naturally, it’s more of a money issue than a civic pride issue, as the New York Times points out in an article today:

As a result of the higher official population figures, the Bloomberg administration estimates that between 2004 and 2010 an additional $36 million in federal housing assistance will flow to New York State, with most of that going to the city.

Incidentally, in 2010, if the current figures continue on track, the city’s population will hit 8.4 million. Talk about your huddled masses.

Over the past few years, the nutritional research community, chiefly in the firm, warm embrace of large campaigns and grants from major chocolate manufacturers, has been touting the benefits of chocolate because it contains flavonoids, molecular mysterions that have been granted benefits ranging from antioxidant to anti-inflammatory. Never mind that the flavonoids are found in cocoa, one of several ingredients in chocolate, so the actual number of flavonoids in the average highly processed milk chocolate bar can be slim.

Now a report from the October issue of The Journal of Nutrition reveals that such flavonoids can bind to and inhibit a protein in the intestines called CFTR. What does this mean? According to the study’s co-author, “fluid loss by the intestine can be prevented by cocoa flavonoids.” That has to be my favorite euphemism yet this year; in other words, the scientists are telling us that cocoa flavonoids can help prevent diarrhea.

Diarrhea! Diarrhea! It’s O.K. to say it, people.

Now we just have to wait for the candy community to tell us how chocolate can help prevent “fluid loss by the intestine,” or better yet, “fluid loss by a portion of the alimentary canal,” because no one wants to see the word “intestine” in food-related public relations, much less “diarrhea.” And because as every mother knows, when her five-year-old is violently expelling waste from one or more orifices, chocolate is the solution.

This defaced ad, at the W. 14th Street uptown F/V station, is missing an apostrophe but it reminded me that I needed to buy beer tonight for quaffing while watching The West Wing.

On W. 35th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.

On my way to work, I pass the New Yorker, the sprawling brown-brick Art Deco hotel that sits regally on Eighth Avenue between W. 34th and 35th Streets. It’s about 40 stories tall and takes up the whole western half of the block, so to depict the building and its iconic signage, I had to stand way over by Madison Square Garden to take this photo.

The New Yorker has a storied history as one of the city’s largest and tallest hotels when it was built in 1930, with 2,500 rooms, the nation’s biggest private power plant and, according to the AIA Guide to New York City, boasted during its heyday 92 “telephone girls” at the 41st-floor switchboards and a 42-chair barber shop with 20 manicurists. The ballroom is famously grand, hosting Benny Goodman, Woody Herman and the Dorsey Brothers back in the day, and filmed by Woody Allen for scenes in Radio Days and Bullets Over Broadway.

Majesty aside, the hotel’s newest news can be found high on its backside, where its signature signage began lacking letters recently.

In the current issue of Time Out New York, Katherine Pushkar explains that the hotel is replacing the sign, letter by letter, with one that will shine red at night, starting in mid-November. Hotel spokesperson Tom McCaffery claims, “It’ll blind people in New Jersey,” and having taken the Circle Line boat tour last summer, I can report that even unlit, the sign is fully visible from the Hudson River, despite the density of the skyline.

Posted in 1941, the original sign shone red from 1945 until the hotel fell on hard times in the late ’60s and closed in 1972. Four years later, Sun Myung Moon’s World Unification Church snapped up the building for worship purposes, but in 1994 reverted part of it to a hotel. Run by Ramada, it’s now promoted as a low-cost, centrally located place for tourists to stay.

Happy 75th birthday New Yorker! This new sign will be the candles on your cake.