November 2006 Archives

In what’s being heralded as the first outdoor ad campaign in the U.S. that’s scent-based, the California Milk Processor Board is extending its “Got Milk?” ads to be posted in five San Francisco bus shelters with aromatic strips that will release the scent of freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies.

Will it work? I like the prediction quoted in today’s San Francisco Chronicle from a 16-year-old high school student: “It’s going to smell like cookies and bums.”

Dude, I totally saw Tom Waits tonight, 20 feet away from me at the United arrivals area of San Francisco International Airport. He was loading his own gear into a Virgin shuttle van (Virgin Airlines? Virgin Records?). He’s much more gaunt in real life than I imagined. Before I could whip out my camera, he had climbed into the van and was off to points unknown. Instead, I offer you this photo of the 737 wing at takeoff from LAX.

It’s not all health nuts here, apparently.

I sat next to a minor celebrity on my flight out to Long Beach, California this afternoon. He was a 50s-ish fellow with a moustache who looked like what a younger brother of Robert DeNiro would look like, only skinnier and taller.

He started with the usual seatmate small talk, the Q&A that can worry me when I wonder whether it will carry on throughout the flight. Yes, I live in New York. Yes, I’m going to Long Beach on business. My business? Real estate.

I learned he’s a lawyer and splits his time between homes in Los Angeles and Cranford, New Jersey, which he described as being famous for the fact that the Ashton Kutcher/Bernie Mac movie Guess Who was filmed there. I found out that he too has a Sony Ericsson T610 and that he too thinks the reception is appalling (inability to get signals inside buildings, etc.) and that he too wonders why he hasn’t yet bought a new phone.

But his minor claim to fame was, as he confided to me, that he’s the guy with the ad on the back cover of the Long Beach yellow pages.

So the first thing I did after arriving at my hotel was to slide open the nightstand drawer and flip over the phone book. Sure enough, there was Mr. Moustache in the requisite Lawyer Standing In Front Of A Wall Of Important-Looking Books photo. Judging by the tie width, shininess and design, and a lack of gray in the hair and moustache, I estimated it was taken in the mid ’80s. But I definitely still recognized him there, cellphone troubles years away, under the headline PROVEN RESULTS!, with notes that he has 32 years trial experience and accepts major credit cards.

In a study of 15,000 Americans, economist Jan Brueckner has found that the less crowded a neighborhood, the friendlier its residents, according to a Los Angeles Times article today (“Where to hear ‘Hi, neighbor!’: in the suburbs” by Roy Rivenburg). In other words, suburbs are better for people’s social life than cities.

For every 10% drop in population density, the likelihood of people talking to their neighbors once a week goes up 10%, regardless of race, income, education, marital status or age.

Brueckner writes that wariness of social contact in cities stems from a want of privacy in a crowded environment, fear of crime and an abundance of museums, theaters and the like that don’t require socialization. (That last one was one of the reasons I moved to a big city to begin with!)

Although not wholeheartedly, I agree more with the philosophy of playwright Eric Bogosian, who has made a cottage industry of slagging the suburbs. “I find the suburbs a difficult place to live,” he writes in a typical statement. “They’re cold and weird. I like people and in the city I get to see lots of people.”

I think I probably have just as many friends here in the city, if not more, than when I lived in the suburbs. And I’m required to bring up the true cliché that New Yorkers are friendlier than outsiders give them credit for. They really are but they’re sometimes not as immediately approachable. It takes work getting past the hard candy shell to reach the friendly nougat center.

I’m back in New York from my Ohio Thanksgiving vacation and thinking about gluttony. According to Adam Jacot De Boinod, who wrote a book about non-English words that don’t have English counterparts, the Germans have a word, Kummerspeck, for the excess weight one gains from emotion-related overeating. It translates literally as “grief bacon.”

That is awesome.

While waiting to be seated for a traditional Cleveland Heights lunch at Tommy’s, Dana and I moseyed over to Ohio’s best toy store, Big Fun, to see how their new digs have been faring.

Sometime over the last 12 months, the store moved from a shack-sized location across the street, crammed literally floor to ceiling with antique and retro toys and novelties, to a store at least three times as large on the other side. We were curious to see if the proprietors had been able to maintain the feel of coziness and wonder the original location had, while allowing freedom of movement; space issues in the original store dictated frequent pressing up against cabinets of Smurfs or vintage lunchboxes in otder to let other customers pass. High Tide/Rock Bottom, the business that used to be located in the larger space, was a bland sort of Spencer’s Gifts, selling saucy cards, posters and knickknacks: maybe ironically, the sort of store that dreams of being a store like Big Fun. But the ceilings there were high and dropped, of the white acoustic tile variety found in soul-sucking corporate office environments, and the hard floors were covered in that thin gray carpeting, also on loan from the land of Aeron chairs and fluorescent tube lighting. In short, not the atmosphere anyone wants in a toy store billed not only as big but fun.

Happily, they’ve been able to sort it out. They’ve ripped up the carpeting in part of the back, revealing unpolished but pleasing-to-the-feet hardwood flooring. Other major swaths of the floor have been expertly covered in sturdy plywood painted caution yellow, which makes sense somehow. And the ceilings: well, there was apparently no option to jettison those acoustic tiles, so the storeowners hired some artists or hooligans or artistic hooligans to plaster-tag the thing with vibrant spray-painted graffiti of psychedelic bursts, mischievous cartoons and the name of the store in explosive typefaces. It’s now the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, ghetto-fabulousized. Why I didn’t take a photo of this for your elucidation, I’m unsure, but believe me when I tell you the overall effect is like the hermit crab getting all comfy in its roomy new shell.

Decor aside, the practical benefit of the bigger Big Fun is of course more display space. Mouth-watering to those of us born in the ’70s and early-’80s are the tall glass cases crammed with seemingly every Transformer ever transformed, every G.I. Joe figurine ever posed with Action Accessories (or, if Zartan, placed in the freezer), even every Strawberry Shortcake, all artfully posed, all for sale. The centerpiece in the back corner, at least for those of us who gain instant fond memories upon hearing the phrase “and knowing is half the battle,” is a cheesy display (covered in “Do Not Touch!” signs) of the G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier, as big as Gary Coleman and a premium item surely only that dick from Silver Spoons could afford. For scale, the G.I. Joe Hovercraft I once owned and painstakingly applied approximately 100 decals to, is floating indistinctly nearby in the poorly painted styrofoam sea. I couldn’t help but notice the depth charges were missing and that it’s an awful lot smaller than I remembered it being during intensive battle missions in the bathtub.

What a great store. It’s a challenge still to avoid exclaiming “Whoah!” like Keanu or asking your shopping companion every five minutes “Hey, remember this?” (or just telling her, “You gotta see this!”) while pointing at some near-forgotten plaything.

We drove back to Cleveland from Thanksgiving at Grandma’s and lazed around in the typical post-gorging stupor. We watched the ABC Movie of the Week, Shrek 2, which I don’t think any of us had previously seen. It was laugh-out-loud funny for all of us. Definitely worth a rental if you haven’t seen it.

It’s Thanksgiving at Grandma’s! We ordered a ready-to-heat-up dinner from Meijer, an easy and thrifty option, and it was better than I would have expected. Good turkey, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie, although the stuffing boasted the consistency and flavor of mortar and the gravy left us wanting Dad’s giblet-based secret recipe. Mom rounded out the meal with that famous green bean casserole made with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup and topped with French’s French Fried Onions that brown up all nice and crispy.

Later, in a strange echo of the mouse issue at the homestead in Cleveland, we followed Grandma around the house from cellar to attic, cardboard feed-boxes of d-CON pellets in hand, to place strategically for maximum death tolls. Lke many grandmas, Grandma is very old and somewhat fragile, so for safety’s sake, she prefers to climb backwards down the steep set of stairs from the second story. The best bit was when she hurled her cane down the stairs ahead of her, not wanting to have to clamber down with it. The catastrophic sound of something heavy tumbling down the stairs alarmed folks on the ground floor although Dana and I found it funny.

T’was the day before Thanksgiving and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, especially this mouse.

The backstory: A few days ago, Mom and Dad had spotted a mouse (this one?) in the kitchen and had recently placed two traps along the baseboards beneath the cabinets. My Mom runs a militantly clean house and she’s never had a vermin problem previously, so we surmise this one snuck in from the garage, perhaps where he’d parked his motorcycle.

It was early and I wanted breakfast but I figured I’d better empty the trap before the ladies rose. Talk about bad timing: I was out in the garage, grabbing a garbage bag and suiting up with a yellow Playtex dishwashing glove, when I heard Mom’s “Aaaaah!” from the kitchen. Ironically, if I wouldn’t have wasted time photographing the corpse, I probably could have bagged it before her discovery, its cute little arm hanging limply out of the side of the trap like that.

I left work an hour early today to catch my flight out of La Guardia back home to Cleveland for Thanksgiving vacation. Why is it all hell breaks loose at work the day I try to leave on vacation? It was in preparation for the last four real estate networking events my division is planning, which someone scheduled in four corners of the U.S. within a nine-day period following Thanksgiving. I imagine you’ll be reading about those.

The flight, meanwhile, was non-eventful for a La Guardia flight, which is to say 15 minutes late boarding, an hour late taking off and crowded. For dinner, my Mom, Dad and sister got some pizza, other finger food and wine at a place in downtown Akron. It’s always good to see the family, especially with my sister Dana done with her multiyear stay in Ireland and temporarily living with my folks.

In what it’s calling an “experimental marketing” campaign, Procter & Gamble has temporarily converted a Times Square storefront at 1540 Broadway between West 45th and 46th Streets to a bank of 20 public toilets. Dubbed the Charmin Restrooms, the stalls are staffed by attendant-janitors and include baby changing stations, stroller parking, seating areas, tourist information and aromatherapy. They’re open 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. daily and according to Charmin’s brand manager, guarantee “an irreplaceable bathroom experience in the heart of Times Square.”

I guess that’d be compared to the everyday bathroom experiences of bums that lend the area’s subway stations their piquancy of urine and poo. (My secret maneuver when nature calls on Times Square is to ascend a flight or two at the Marriott Marquis Hotel and use their surprisingly clean and sparsely attended “public” restrooms.) This should be an interesting experiment in attempted cleanliness and prevention of illicit activities associated with public restrooms, particularly with the city apparently still mulling options for its own banks of public pay toilets.

I only today caught up on last Sunday’s New York Times Style Magazine, a seasonal supplement I read if I have time. Mainly I avoid it because it angers me that I will never have a salary large enough to be considered among the magazine’s demographic, people who can relate to articles with leads that begin like this: “When the architect Annabelle Selldorf designed her dream kitchen in her weekend home in East Hampton....”

I felt better reading a one-pager in it by Alexandra Jacobs, an editor for The New York Observer, who writes that she “abohor[s] music’s slow seepage into every nook and cranny of American life,” particularly when she’s dining. Aside from taking a position I disagree with, and it being a trend piece that seems to base its trend on something that happened only to the author and a few of her friends, her article contains the most winceworthy simile I’ve read recently:

While entertaining, he simply summons a station of streaming commercial-free indie rock through his computer, like a school of salmon over that great river of the Internet.

Like a school of salmon? This phrase brings the author’s whiny enterprise to a halt. It doesn’t seem to have been made in jest (although possibly ignorance, in that venerable mainstream media tradition of being five years behind on general knowledge of technology and pop culture).

It’s so bad, I’ll conclude with this photo of a salmon striving to justify its small existence, much like Alexandra Jacobs writing.

I caught the Ohio State/Michigan game at Andie and Eric’s tonight. What a corker and what a sweet victory for my homestate Buckeyes. All I ask for in football games is closely scored excitement, which this match provided abundantly: turnarounds, close scores (for a time), spectacular passes, catches and rushes and other associated thrills seldom associated with the NFL games that have given the sport a bad name for me, bogged down with their blowouts, conservative play and penalties aplenty.

If there’s a newish barbecue establishment in this city, I’m likely to catch wind and give it a try. Rack and Soul is another one of those that got graced with a few graphs in The New Yorker when it opened, this summer, I think. The rack of baby back ribs I carried-out tonight was yummy, although strangely not very smoky. The sauce was mild but flavorful so I didn’t care too much. I wish there was another way to say the meat on barbecue was “fall off the bone tender” but there isn’t and it was. For sides I got the yams (rich and sweet) and the baked beans, which had big ol’ chunks of pork in there. All that and the requisite mini-loaf of cornbread. Nice well-lit and warm decor: sort of diner style, with a lot of small tables and wooden chairs, as well as some tables for larger parties featuring bright red vinyl booths. A wee pricy, but that’s to be expected from what’s nearly my old Upper West Side neighborhood.

Rack and Soul

• 2818 Broadway (at West 110th Street)
• (212) 222-4800
• Meal 35 of 52: 1/4 rack baby back ribs with cornbread and two sides ($13.95).

Last week on Times Square, the U.S. military installed a $1,000 sound system atop its recruitment center to ward off pigeons that wish to roost or shit on it, according to a Reuters story today (“Military Holds Fire in Pigeon War” by Nick Olivari).

At random intervals, the system broadcasts the sound of predatory birds, apparently loud enough to be heard over the din. The last deterrent the military tried was a plastic owl. “By the third day, I swear the pigeons wanted to mate with it,” said Robert Esposito, vice president of operations at the Times Square Alliance business group.

In other news, I didn’t know there were pigeons on Times Square. I thought all the waddling, sidewalk-blocking and grubbing was being perpetrated by tourists. Maybe the military could blast Tuvan throat singing from its sound system to annoy and thin the visiting ranks. Alternately, they could play something enticing, like an announcement for a coupon granting free hush puppies at Red Lobster, then forcibly recruit tourists into service as minesweepers or frontline infantry.

The human being by nature and necessity is neither egoist nor altruist; he trims a difficult course between the two; for the most part we are, within the limits of our powers of expression, egotists, and our desire is to think and if possible talk and write about this marvellous experiment of ourselves, with all the world—or as much as we can conveniently assemble—for audience.

H.G. Wells, from his introduction to W.N.P. Barbellion’s Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919)

I travel for work a lot and today I needed to book a flight for three consecutive days in early December when I’ll fly from New York to Washington, D.C. to Fort Lauderdale and back to New York.

I began with my darling JetBlue and immediately hit a snag with their Multi-City booking option, shown in this squashed screencap.

Was I missing something? How was I supposed to add the third and final leg of my trip with this interface? I called JetBlue, begrudgingly because I get double frequent-flyer miles when I book online. An agent named Barry booked my flights and at the end of the call, I asked him to reveal the secret of using the Multi-City option on JetBlue.com.

After checking with a supervisor, he told me what I needed to have done was book the first two legs of my trip using the Multi-City option, then separately book the final leg. He admitted this wasn’t intuitive, didn’t make sense to him and could have been improved. Words of wisdom from Barry, who ended up awarding me double-points even though I’d made the reservations with him.

As the web-wonks at JetBlue must know, improving this interface is doable. Travelocity, which I use sometimes, has a very intuitive Multi-Destination feature, at least for trips of four legs or fewer, shown here in a screencap. After you enter all of your legs, it even totals the cost of each possible full itinerary, which is one of the main reasons for even using a feature like this.

C’mon, JetBlue. I like everything else about you, particularly your personal televisions and potato chips; get cracking on your website. I guarantee other weary travelers have scratched their heads over this Multi-City confusion.

I’ve had the worst luck with corkscrews. Granted, the first one I bought upon moving to Inwood was from the local dollar store. The screw on that one, which I swear was made of plaster, snapped off on the first cork I attempted to pull. For good measure, I cut my hand on it. What did I expect for a dollar?

So I laid down multiple dollars for a nicer model, I believe from KitchenAid. Last night, uncorking some shiraz, the screw somehow came unattached from the rest of the corkscrew mechanism. I was able to pry out the cork very slowly using a can opener that made distressed scraping noises and flaked bits of silvery grit under the unnatural exertion.

Seriously, what’s the deal? Isn’t the [cork]screw the most trustworthily elemental of machines, up there in the trophy case with levers and inclined planes? Is my technique unsound? Do I need to buy a designer corkscrew with sleek German engineering and Powertrain warranty?

I liked Adaptation and thought I would have liked Stranger Than Fiction more than I did.

Will Ferrell is O.K. as an anal IRS agent who realizes he’s a doomed character in a novel being written by a frazzled and pasty Emma Thompson. Her narrative voiceovers, heard only by Ferrell and the film’s audience, run too long for a device that isn’t that funny to begin with. To drive home the metafiction, computer-generated graphics occasionally pop-up and hover superimposed over the action to show, for example, the steps Ferrell counts to his bus stop and the number of strokes he makes when brushing his teeth.

If you’re expecting Ferrell to act like he does in any of his other movies to date, you’ll be disappointed here with a Serious Role that he doesn’t make his own. Someone more well-versed in traditional romantic comedies like Tom Hanks or even Adam Sandler could have been substituted with little difference. And like Jim Carrey circa The Truman Show, Ferrell has added baggage in an audience expecting him to be funny when he’s performing his Serious Role. Trouble is brewing when a movie starring Will Ferrell expects to generate more laughs from costars such as Emma Thompson

His love interest, introduced in perhaps the first-ever Meet Cute during a tax audit, is played by Maggie Gyllenhaal as a sweet firebrand who owns and runs a hipster bakery/coffehouse. I am moved by law to refer to her as “impish” and add her to my often-shifting list of Top-Three Hottest Lady Actors¹.

He woos her with his dopey seriousness and love of her fresh-baked cookies, but what seals the deal is his heartfelt serenade with Wreckless Eric’s song “Whole Wide World”, which he plays for her on her acoustic guitar. She’s so moved, she jumps him right there on the couch for a vigorous makeout session, without even pausing to think that there is no way an anal IRS agent would have ever picked Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World” as the first and only song he learns to play on guitar, despite the fact it’s a brilliant two-cord whiff of punk/new-wave magic.

The whole reason he takes up guitar is because Dustin Hoffman, a natty community college prof just like the one Robin Williams played in Good Will Hunting, inspires him to change the direction of his stale life and foil his untimely demise with a bit of the old carpe diem and carpe puella. That all works brilliantly for characters in movies with messages shopworn as these.

¹ Naomi Watts and Kate Winslet, because I know you were wondering. [back]

My Ohio driver’s expires next month and I never bothered to get a New York ID, so I decided to solve both issues by trading my Ohio license for a New York one.

Despite the suggestion of swiftness, I spent my lunch break today at the License X-Press on 34th Street at Eighth Avenue. I filled out my application, waited in line 20 minutes, had my vision checked and photo taken, waited another 20 minutes on a hard wooden bench, rose when my number was called, paid a glum clerk a bunch of money and...nothing. I still have to wait “one to two weeks” for the license to appear in the mail. Sorry. I thought I’d be able to write about how badly my photo turned out or some other such hilarity.

I went after work to a gallery in SoHo, Location One, to check out an arty robot exhibit. It was crowded there but pretty cool. I liked Ill-Tempered Clangier (a self-playing wind chime) and IPO Madness, a slot machine that randomly generates then attempts to connect to an URL each time the lever is pulled. If it’s a valid URL, you win!

A New York friendship is a friendship with a person you have met at least once. If you have met a person only once, and you are a New Yorker, you are entitled to say, whenever that person’s name comes up in conversation, ’Yes—so-and-so is a friend of mine.’

Kurt Vonnegut, Politics Today essay (1979)

Like the U.S., South Korea is a country fretting over a sizeable baby boomer population fast becoming senior citizens. Solution? Why, robots!

According to a UPI article yesterday from The Korea Times, scientists at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology are developing a voice-recognition robot, dubbed H-Robot 1.0, that will care for the elderly. When it’s completed circa 2013, it will be able to monitor heart rate and blood pressure, order takeout food, clean the house and “summon help in an emergency when its owner falls to floor and doesn’t get up,” according to researcher Kim Mun-Sang, just like a LifeCall device on wheels.

Meanwhile, Samsung recently finished developing a robot that can help out the booming Korean population by rubbing some of it out. Known as the Samsung Techwin SGR-A1, it can autonomously track humans and fire an automatic weapon at them. According to Robots.net, the robot sentries will be deployed next year along the DMZ between North and South Korea, replacing 650,000 South Korean troops.

Samsung’s spec page includes the rendering shown above and lists all sorts of juicy features, such as “laser range finder,” “Intruder recognition and identification using xoom-in [sic],” even a “weapon antitheft device,” which I imagine sounds like one of those annoying repeating-pattern car alarms.

Jeez, didn’t mankind learn anything from the ED-209 and the SAINT? The nerds at Samsung apparently at least Nexflixed Short Circuit because they’ve picked up the SAINT’s spindly wickedness as well as the Evil Glowing Red Eye that’s been a hallmark of evil computers and robots for years.

Someone was struck and killed by a subway train just before 7 a.m. today at the 59th Street/Columbus Circle Station, a possible suicide that caused folks on my line considerable trouble getting into work this morning.

My train slowed to a crawl then stopped around 103rd Street. The conductor kept repeating the announcement, “Because of a passenger requiring medical attention at the 59th Street Station, we are experiencing heavy delays,” probably because that sounded better than, “Some guy just got juiced by a subway!”

The MTA then decided everyone had to exit the 1/2/3 trains because they were no longer operating between 96th and 59th streets. What a mess. At the major intersections on Broadway and thereabouts were masses of impatient commuters waiting for already packed busses and cabs. I thought about walking over to the B or C on Central Park West but I imagined everyone had that idea and, regardless, those lines go through 59th Street Station, too. So I decided to hoof it. The weather was brisk but the exercise was refreshing.

Joe and I braved the New York City Marathon crowds getting to the Upper East Side for the Masters of American Comics exhibit at the Jewish Museum of New York. It’s the work of six guys: Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb, Gary Panter and Chris Ware. Nice mix!

From Kurtzman, one of Mad magazine’s forefathers, there are some of his early “War and Fighting Men” comics under the series names Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales (plus early sketches and colors from his Little Annie Fanny series for Playboy). An R. Crumb sketchbook from 1962 for Fritz the Cat is a Square Deal Composition book which Crumb has cheekily penciled in “Sex” for the subject-line on the cover. There’s also a beautiful 12-panel series for one of his bluesmen profiles, of Charley Patton.

In the Superheroes subsection of the exhibit, I was surprised to learn that Captain America (along with his “young ally,” Bucky, perhaps the worst scrappy sidekick name ever) fought the Nazis in World War II and that Jerry Siegel, originator of Superman, had less popular characters under his belt, especially “The One and Only Superlover,” Jon Juan (“He fights! He loves! He dares!”).

Media mogul Malcolm Forbes collected items mogulesque: hot air balloons, yachts, Fabergé eggs, Harley-Davidson motorcycles. A cache of smaller, more curious things, antiques you might find in a reclusive grandfather’s attic or garage, are displayed on the ground floor of the Forbes Magazine headquarters at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street.

Joe and I checked it out today. As you enter the exhibit space, there’s an extensive collection of toy and model boats. Malcom bought the André, a toy boat the size of a microwave oven, at the Nain-Jaune toy store in Paris. Get this: it’s powered by a gasoline engine. I have to imagine this isn’t meant for play in your average-sized tub. I can’t guess how much that one cost, but it’s a fact Malcom plunked down $28,600 at auction in 1983 for a model of the Lusitania, a world-record amount for a toy at the time. It’s on display, sinking, just like the real thing.

There’s also a large collection of toy soldiers. One set produced in the 1920s called “The Home Farm” was thought to be complete until King George V saw it and wondered aloud why there wasn’t a village idiot. “No English village is complete without him,” he said. The manufacturer, Britains, hastily added an idiot to the set. This whole exchange smacks of apocrypha to me; it’d be like Regan making a big deal over the lack of a village idiot Smurf and then all of a sudden Schleich adds Clumsy.

Malcom’s neatest toy soldier collection is an army of flat tin figurines produced for the English market by German toy powerhouse Heyde. The set, called The Sham Fight, included miniature cannons that shot dry peas. The goal was to knock down your opponent’s soldiers, scoring one point for each private, two for a drummer, four for a sergeant, eight for a captain and ten plus an automatic win for each colonel toppled. Unfortunately for Heyde, the allies received 11 points and a “Win the War by May” card for firebombing the company’s headquarters and plant along with the rest of Dresden during World War II.

In another room hang early Monopoly boards, including prototypes handmade by patent-holder Charles Darrow in the ’20s and ’30s. I’m hesitant to call ol’ Charlie an “inventor” because as Forbes makes plain, he poached the Monopoly idea from a popular forerunner called The Landlord’s Game, patented in 1904 by one Lizzie J. Magie. Elements are nearly identical, from the shape and style of the board, to the Jail and Go To Jail squares. Good old American entrepreneurialism: profiting from the hard work of others. A small collection of Monopoly sets from outside of America reveals one of the game tokens in the Italian version is a tiny tomato, which amused me.

My friend Joe and I saw Avenue Q tonight at the John Golden Theatre. I was pleasantly surprised and greatly amused. In my mind, I hate musicals because the songs get shoehorned into unlikely moments and put feelings I’d rather see enacted into hamfisted lyrics. The songs work in Avenue Q because most are sung by puppets, and if Sesame Street taught me anything it’s that puppets can (nay, must) sing. Also, as you’ve probably heard, the songs are politically incorrect and feature naughty words. Many hit near my heart with subjects like getting out of one’s apartment to enjoy the city, making mixtapes, racism, gay friends and, in a song by a puppet that sounds suspiciously like Cookie Monster, internet pornography. So many quick references and humorous turns on New York facts and myths: dropping a penny off the empire state building, easy NYU girls, the challenge of a black man successfully hailing a cab and many more.

The pacing is speedy and there’s hardly time at all for dialogue as the songs hit one after another, but the play boiled-down is a love-story: Princeton, a puppet just out of college, moves to Brooklyn and tries to find his purpose in life while having an off-and-on relationship with another puppet, Kate Monster. Strangely, the puppets not only mingle with human actors, the puppeteers mimic the movements, sightlines and facial expressions of the puppets they’re controlling. It took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to be focusing on, but I ended up watching mainly the puppets.

After Dirty Bird To-Go, which fries your chicken when you place your order, I fear no other fried chicken will ever taste as hot and crisp. It sure wasn’t at Soul Fixins, where the skin was limp, oily and warm, as if it was leftover from lunch under the heatlamps. To their credit, it was a large plump and juicy breast (with wing attached) and the mac-and-cheese side was delicious (my other side, corn, was just...corn). My friend Joe and I initially tried eating here today for lunch but the half-dozen tables were packed so we came back for dinner. Not much atmosphere, O.K. food and somewhat decent prices for the neighborhood, at least according toTime Out New York’s Cheap Eats issue earlier this year.

Soul Fixins

• 371 W. 34th St. (just off Ninth Avenue)
• (212) 736-1345
• Meal 34 of 52: a breast of fried chicken and two side dishes ($9.95).

Well, now, nothing like this ever happened before at one of our real estate conferences. There's a union group of janitors on strike in Houston who feel they're not getting enough money and benefits. They noticed we had senior-level representatives from some of the city’s largest property owners, including Hines, one of the largest property management firms in the world. So a wily plainclothes group of protestors representing the janitors infiltrated our event.

They just walked in and took random name badges from our registration table. (Typically we just spread out the badges in alphabetical order for the taking and never check ID.) Then they blended themselves into the 300-strong audience of real estate executives seated in the ballroom of the hotel where we held our big opening sessions.

Every 10 minutes, one of them would stand up and start ranting loudly about inequity and health care. At first, we thought it was a joke or someone planted by one of our more mischievous speakers onstage. But when it happened about four more times, every ten minutes, it became clear we were dealing with some good old fashioned protest shenanigans, just like those students who seize the stage from political candidates or college presidents.

Hotel security was eventually called in, but short of checking every ID in the room, we were hard pressed to identify further hecklers, seeing as most of them were dressed in suits or sports jackets. Each time one of them rose, the more burly and surly of our staff rushed over to escort them from the room. This wasn’t too tough because one of our guys from the Los Angeles office resembles Sterling Hayden in appearance, frame and temperament.

We buttressed our entrance with a security checkpoint and fended off further intrusions, although when we left for the airport after the event, we got stuck in a snarl of traffic. Having been ejected from the hotel, the protestors decided to handcuff themselves to garbage cans and lay down in a circle in the middle of one of uptown Houston’s busiest intersections. They were eventually arrested.

I flew to Houston this afternoon for a real estate conference my company’s producing. I’d wondered why my flight out of JFK on Continental was so cheap and I think it’s because the airline just started there or something because its check-in area is literally the size and solidity of Lucy’s psychiatric help booth. It’s just sitting there at the far end of terminal 4, which houses most of the scrappier international airlines, like Aer Lingus, so I really thought I was in the wrong place up until the point I was issued a boarding pass.

I wish I could tell you that the stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas, but the city lights get in the way and this is only a sad airport-hotel-airport trip. I was also disappointed as the cab sped by two ’50s-style A-frame Whataburger restaurants I know I won’t have time to eat at.