August 2007 Archives

A group of us planned a Labor Day Weekend camping adventure at Hickory Run State Park in eastern Pennsylvania. But how best to escape New York?

Rental car companies jack up rates for prime travel holidays like Labor Day and with New York already besieged by stratospheric prices, a cheaper alternative is New Jersey. Megan and I met at Penn Station this morning and took a 1:28 p.m. Northeast Corridor train, transferred at Secaucus and arrived at Rutherford around 1:53 p.m. And then we waited for the complimentary Enterprise Rent-A-Car shuttle. And waited.

Then we waited some more.

Then I bought some sodas for us to drink while we waited.

Then Megan fielded increasingly vexed calls and text messages from our camping compatriots waiting in Manhattan for us.

Half an hour later, a shuttle showed up, but it was for two other people who’d reserved a pick-up about half an hour before us and were that much more bitter. And, no, we couldn’t share a ride because it was a pickup truck, and apparently it’s against the law for live humans to ride in the bed of a pickup in New Jersey, so there was no room for us and our rapidly diminishing patience.

Megan and I decided the new tagline for Enterprise should be, “We’ll Get You There... Eventually.” Finally, an animated cherubic-faced Italian-Jersey fellow by the name of Michael showed up, full of apologies and anecdotes about how he himself had tried camping several times, but kept getting hampered by the weather, which didn’t sound as bad to me as getting hampered by a delayed courtesy shuttle.

He said things in earnest like “Yous guys” and noted at one point that he lived with his mother. We tried to rush him through the car inspection but he was keen on crouching in the lot and studiously inspecting our Ford from various angles, looking for scratches longer than two inches and dents larger than golf balls. His business card, which he handed to me just before our departure, gave his title as “Management Trainee” and we complimented him on a fine job. I’m sure his mother is proud.

Upon arriving at Vincent’s apartment complex on the East Side, we combat-loaded the cars with coolers, supplies and people. I took off in the Man Car with Vincent, Aaron and Paul and there was periodic bickering over GPS-obfuscated shortcuts and temperature control. By the time we arrived, the folks already at the site were cranky because we were late, and it was dark, and they’d seen a black bear in the woods, and why the fuck were we off buying beer when our car contained all the equipment? Surliness swirled like campfire sparks in the dark but it was O.K. because the real adventure was to begin tomorrow.

Spook Country is the most realistic yet of the novels of William Gibson, an author commonly lumped into the sci-fi sector. It takes place only last year and, like Gibson’s previous novel, Pattern Recognition, combines “futuristic” technology from the pages of Wired: virtual realty, overseas shipments via cargo container, GPS surveillance and tracking and a strange preoccupation with using iPods as hard drives, which is so five-years-ago. The structure is a round-robin, alternating a chapter per main character, until the group collides at the end on the West Coast for a payoff that while, unexpected, isn’t entirely rewarding seeing how much it’s been built up to. I enjoyed a certain familiarity with New York City topography; there’s an action sequence that takes place in a geographically accurate Union Square, complete with Greenmarket and a near-showdown at the W Hotel, while a pair of other characters room at the Hotel New Yorker and eat the Gray’s Papaya two blocks north, right across the street from where I work.

After work today, I joined Andie in her three-bedroom apartment hunt in my neck of the woods. The first, on Cabrini near the upper 190th Street station on the A train, was too small. Another grubbier place further downtown was also too tiny and claustrophobic to boot, with very high ceilings and a distinct lack of windows. The broker, Meg, grew up on Arden in Inwood, which made me glad I didn’t rag on the neighborhood too much.

In discussing the gentrification of Upper Manhattan, she kept starting sentences with, “Back when I was growing up here,” which made me want to say something like, “You mean last week?” because she appeared to be in her mid-20s. She seemed to be nervous about showing us around, unable to unlock the door of the one apartment in less than 10 tries, and mousily shuffling through scraps of paper in her binder trying to find the address of another place she thought Andie would like when we should have told her not to bother.

She had a curiously impassioned defense about the infamous murder rates in Washington Heights in the ’80s and ’90s: the mafia, not fully sold on the wonders of New Jersey marshlands for disposing of corpses, had been using Fort Tryon Park as a dumping ground, she told me, and, apparently, murders are tallied where the body is found, not where the murder took place, so WaHi got a bad rap back in the day. O.K., maybe, though it seemed a little too much information for a real estate broker to be revealing, as talk about murders and crime rates typically don’t do much in the way of assisting a sale.

Afterwards, Andie and I had dinner at The Heights. The rooftop eating area was full but we were seated in the center of the giant second-floor picture window overlooking Broadway, the famous red neon sign of Tom’s Restaurant visible through the trees. My chicken timpano was billed as lasagna-like but was really a salmagundi of tortillas, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream, shredded chicken, and other staple Mexican ingredients. It was fresh and hearty though not what I’d expected.

The Heights Bar & Grill

• 2867 Broadway
• (212) 866-7035
• Meal 38 of 52: chicken timpano ($10.95), chips and salsa ($3) and a margarita ($7).

Vatican City, the only place on Earth where Latin is an official language, has published an English/Latin dictionary to keep up with words that might not have direct translations to Latin. “Many of them [are] compounds of existing Latin words,” noted an Associated Press article from 2003. “Dishwasher is escariorum lavator and disco is orbium phonographicorum theca.”

The Vatican recently issued a third volume of the dictionary, mainly to cover words borne from the sphere of computers and other technology, and a friend and I were guessing what sort of compound monstrosity would be the word for “blog.” We were thinking it’d be something literal, maybe based on “the web” (arachnoideum) or “cheap ‘n’ nasty” (the prefix vili- or vil-), but we were over-thinking it.

According to N.S. Gill, a “Latinist” and contributor to About.com, the word for blog is ephemeris, which means daybook or diary, or more tellingly, as suggested by the English word ephemera, short-lived bits of scrapbook stuff: notes, pictures, postcards, letters, ticket stubs, programs, menus, catalogs and the like.

Gill cites a quote from Juvenal’s Satires that serves nicely as a blogger’s credo: tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes, which can be translated as, “He has a compulsion for writing.”

That’s about right, I’d say.

I’m not usually up for creatively cheap dinners in a pinch, but I had this sweet potato left over from a previous recipe that was starting to resemble E.T. so I thought I’d use it before it started wreaking havoc in my fridge. I diced it and sautèed it with some onion and garlic in canola oil, then threw in a can of Goya refried beans, spread the mix on some tortillas I’d warmed in a pan on the stove, then sprinkled on shredded mozzarella cheese. Tasty.

I like the location of Dallas Jones Bar-B-Q, snug in a nook where West Houston and Bedford Street meet just off Sixth Avenue in the Village, right around the corner from the Film Forum. There are only three tables in the place, which is about the size of my bedroom, but judging by the flurry of deliverymen coming and going, they do most of their business via phoned-in orders from neighborhood denizens.

My pulled pork sandwich featured a generous pile of sweet and spicy meat on a soft bun, and my wine was fine, although I’m not entirely clear why I ordered white, which I don’t like and which didn’t complement the BBQ well, as if any wine could.

Dallas Jones Bar-B-Q

• 178 W. Houston St. (corner of Bedford)
• (212) 731-7390
• Meal 37 of 52: pulled pork sandwich ($10.95) and a glass of Pinot Grigio ($7).

Paddington: quite possibly the best cat ever. I’m checking up on him while Kelly is frolicking with friends in the Hamptons this weekend. As soon as I let myself into her apartment, he ran over, meowing all the way, as if to say, “Where were you? I was worried sick you wouldn’t show.” And by “worried sick” I mean “coughing up hairballs the size of potato pancakes,” because there two were, right in the front hallway.

Kelly had warned me Paddington’s hobby is daily hairball expulsion and although the angle of my photo above conceals it, Paddington is a big tom with a large surface area, so I think he just needed a good brushing. But I didn’t see a cat brush lying around with the other cat stuff, so I took a short trip downtown on the 1 and bought one from a discount pet store.

I wish I could remember the name of this brush (or this type of brush), but it was recommended by a woman I work with who lives with a pair of cats she named Jack and Tyler after the characters from Fight Club. The brush is a simple band of sheet steel, about an inch wide, folded into the shape of a loop with a handle. On the looped end, nubby little teeth have been cut into one side of the steel. They’re not sharp, but when you brush the cat, the loose hair is gently raked off in clumps.

There wasn’t enough hair when I was done brushing Paddington to construct a whole other cat, but there was probably enough for an unconvincing toupee. Paddington seemed to like the brushing (“he likes to be stroked by volatile objects,” Kelly confirmed later), but he enjoyed most everything: following me around, enjoying my shiatsu-style sessions of petting, sitting there starting at me as I talked to him as if to say, “You, sir, are a genius.” I lay on the living room floor for a while because I imagine that short animals like it when you’re at their level. He showed his appreciation by playfully head-butting me until I thought he might break the frames on my glasses, then he curled up next to me with his head on my arm. Awwwww.

I can’t decide if this Danny Shanahan cartoon from the August 27th issue of The New Yorker is a tribute to Gary Larson’s Far Side panel shown below, a ripoff, or just a coincidence.

I think Shanahan is reaching with the “funny” pun; it took me a while to realize that, oh, it’s a clown the elephant has stepped on and clowns are funny. See, it’s a play on words.

Larson is more to the point, and you can’t deny the humor in the grimace-face of the flattened caveman. If I remember the history behind Larson’s cartoon correctly, he couldn’t even get it by the censors at his syndicate, and it either lay unpublished for years or ran with a watered down version of the caption (“I THOUGHT I heard something squeak.”).

Franny’s pizza reminds me of Grimaldi’s, which is probably some sort of massive insult to New York pizza-eating elite, especially because it’s a hipster joint in Park Slope. I’ve been meaning to go here since learning, in January 2006, that they don’t deliver. My pizza was up to snuff: thin, lightly charred crust, super fresh rounds of cheese, whole leaves of basil. It wasn’t segmented into slices so I ate the whole thing with a knife and fork, which involved a lot of scooting the pizza around on my plate. I wanted a fresh cocktail in the mojito family, so I tried one of the house drinks, the Sparkling Mint, which in addition to mint, lime juice and mint syrup, was made with the Champagne-like Prosecco and Cynar, for which I required a translation from my server. She described the Italian liqueur as having the flavor of “bitter artichoke”, and yet I still ordered the drink, and indeed, was refreshed by it and its strange bitterness. For dessert I had the panna cotta, which I’d describe as a creamy flan, topped with a grape syrup. Yum.

Franny’s

• 295 Flatbush Ave., Brooklyn
• (718) 230-0221
• Meal 36 of 52: Sparkling Mint cocktail ($11), pizza ($15), panna cotta ($8) and espresso ($3.50).

A little sarcastic back-and-forth at work about attending an upcoming “green” real estate development event.

C.

I plan on attending wearing a business suit constructed entirely of styrofoam, plastic bags and Pampers. I will be arriving via a gas-guzzling 1965 Cadillac and carrying several cans of Aqua Net hairspray.

Jason

I will descend to the stage from the rafters on a smoking jetpack fueled by the blood of cute, endangered animals and chilled by Arctic glacier melt. Then I will personally kick Leonardo DiCaprio’s ass for being such a smug jerk about his Prius.

Andie spotted this sign after our dinner and drinks at Fred’s tonight and as you can see, it’s caught in a simultaneous Walk/Don’t Walk state, kind of like Schrödinger’s cat, except instead of a 50% chance of having a dead cat on your hands, there’s a 50% chance you’ll get hit by a Fresh Direct truck on Amsterdam while trying to take a flashless photo of a flashing sign in the dark.

Lightly sweet and bright, this is a great August soup, which is when you’re going to find yellow squash (no, not butternut) in the stores. I like how most all the ingredients are yellow or orange: when you mix the onion-carrot-potato purée, it turns out the near-impossible-in-nature DayGlo orange of orange juice concentrate, but becomes golden yellow once everything is combined by the end of the recipe. This one’s not quite exciting enough for me to recommend as a meal in itself (although that’s how I ate it); I imagine it’d go well with a creative salad or chicken cutlets or whatever it is people eat at home for dinner these days.

I made my way in the cold rain to Fort Greene for dinner at Habana Outpost, which is just a block away from The Smoke Joint, the BBQ restaurant I went to earlier this month. I’d made a note then to return because Habana Outpost appeared to be a visual cross between a Havana bar and a music video by The B-52’s. I forgot all about it of course, but then Time Out New York did a mini writeup on it this week, so I figured someone was trying to tell me something and I’d better go.

Orders are placed and beverage collected at the counter inside, then you walk your meal ticket outside to the cooks inside the bright red mail truck parked in the restaurant’s courtyard. The grilled corn-on-the-cob sprinkled with crumbled cotija cheese and spices: so good. The Cuban sandwich, roast pork, ham, Swiss cheese, pickles and chipotle mayo lovingly smooshed between two big pieces of toasted flatbread, was satisfying though nothing out of the ordinary.

Because of the rain, it wasn’t as hopping out there as it can supposedly get, though there was a D.J. and a few stalwarts huddled under the tables with umbrellas. In nicer weather, they hook up a blender to the stationary bike near the fence and you can pedal-blend your own margarita. There’s a bunch of other hippie crap, too: biodegradable plates and cups and silverware, a recycling station that’s just plain confusing if you’ve been drinking, and some strange restrooms that are like corrugated sheet metal outhouses located out back. On Sundays, they show movies outdoors, projected on the side of the building, but apparently not when it’s raining. I can’t imagine this place stays open in the winter, but if it does, it loses a full half of its charm.

Habana Outpost

• 757 Fulton St. (at South Portland Avenue), Brooklyn
• (718) 858-9500
• Meal 35 of 52: Cuban sandwich ($7.25), corn-on-the-cob ($2) and some beers.

I only own, like, one pair of jeans. Levi’s 511s. Don’t worry, I wash them weekly. Okay, maybe once every two weeks, but more often in the summer when they’re likely to get sweaty. I don’t know about you, but I’ve tried buying backup pairs of jeans to these ur-jeans, but I end up not wearing them, because the ones I always wear are the comfiest. You’d think I’d just buy multiple pairs of the same jeans, but see: how do I know I like them until I’ve worn them for awhile? If I don’t like them, and I’ve bought three pairs, that’s three pairs never to be worn again. And by the time I find I like a pair, the time has passed to buy multiples, because the first pair have become my favorite pair.

And here it is: The Bourne Ultimatum is like a favorite pair of jeans. Comfortable, lived-in, a little sweaty, nothing unexpected and unlikely to be a cause for undue recognition/adoration, unless you’re writing a blog entry seemingly about jeans or you’re the nerds on IMDb.com who have, as of last check, voted the film the 66th best of all time. Ultimatum isn’t that; it’s more of the same: manic cutting of scenes of hand-to-hand contact and car chases, grim bureaucrats tracking Bourne and an even grimmer Bourne tracking the bureaucrats while trying to find his raisons d’ être and/or true identity. Popcorny summer fun!

Instant ramen noodles constituted a formative brick of my collegiate food pyramid. I will admit eating many a pack of chicken-, sometimes beef- flavored Maruchan Ramen back in the day, bought for pennies apiece and flavored with a salty powder included in a foil square reminiscent of a wrapped condom.

In my adult life, ramen ranks among my favored home remedies of tempering a sinus headache. I hold my face close over the hot steam as the noodles boil, then fork down the gunk to rebalance my electrolytes and ease my fatigue, or something like that.

My sense before tonight of eating ramen in an actual ramen establishment seems informed by dystopic sci-fi movies¹. In The Fifth Element, Bruce Willis learns from a wizened Asian ramen-vendor that he’s been fired. In Blade Runner, Harrison Ford learns from a wizened Asian ramen-vendor that he’s being arrested by Edward James Olmos. “He say you under arrest, Mr. Deckard,” quoth the wizened Asian ramen-vendor. “He say you Blade Runner.”

Taking place in a futuristic Los Angeles (“November, 2019”), Blade Runner visually adds, as I think William Gibson has, that you must eat your ramen while wearing an overcoat and seated at a counter of a stall-like street vendor, beneath a florescent-lit awning, as around you, the cold rain pours and crowds mill by under umbrellas with rods that appear to be light sabers.

Well, it was dark and cold and rainy tonight, and New York, at least the East Village, is probably as grittily deteriorated a match to Los Angeles 2019, so I took the L east then walked over, under my unlit umbrella, to Ramen Setagaya, an outpost of a Japanese noodle chain. There are a scant few tables for two and I sat at the narrow counter on a black-lacquered wooden stool. I was only about two feet away from the two cooks, who scurried about the tiny kitchen preparing dishes in clouds of fragrant steam. Each gentleman wore a yellow T-shirt printed with the chain’s logo and, oddly, had a white terry-cloth hand-towel wrapped around his head and tied in the back, as if he’d just exited a shower.

A flat-screen TV near the entrance looped a bewildering array of cooking shows, gameshows, commercials and promotional videos, all of which seemed to feature Setagaya ramen, and none of which had subtitles or a lick of English otherwise. After calling for a Sapporo, I started out with the Oshinko pickled vegetables, none of which I recognized but all three of which were tasty. For my noodles, I opted for the pork BBQ salt ramen (or “cha-syu-men,” according to the mostly Japanese menu, unless that’s actually a pronunciation guide). The tender, thin-sliced pork floated in a rich noodle broth of various chopped vegetables, seaweed and half of a soft-boiled egg with a vibrant yellow, goopy yolk, floating there like a lifeboat.

Unless this is a prank on Westerners, I’m told that in Japan it is good manners to slurp one’s noodles, as if to audibly yet nonverbally complement the chef. Suspicious of this, I ate mine silently and with a minimum of wet whiplash, although two Asian gentlemen down the counter to my right were consistently and noisily Hoovering in large tangles from their bowls. A sideways glance revealed that, with noodles dangling from their faces, they resembled Cthulhu and his “awful squid-head with writhing feelers.”

All told, and as expected, much heartier and tastier ramen than those dehydrated bricks from my youth, and better yet, nothing bad happened to me during my meal, unless you count that giant puddle I accidentally stepped in on First Avenue afterwards.

Ramen Setagaya

• 141 First Ave. (between St. Marks Place and East 9th Street)
• (212) 529-2740
• Meal 34 of 52: pickled vegetables ($2), pork BBQ ramen ($11) and a bottle of Sapporo ($4).

¹ I’ve seen Tampopo, but I’m going to conveniently ignore that here. [back]

Yesterday’s New York Times published a recipe for an eggplant salad that I made soon after returning from my California trip. This may very well be one of the tastiest ever summer salads and I nearly didn’t make it because of the precious little story accompanying the recipe that includes the sentence “But recently I found myself in possession of an eggplant and without a plan.” Via this anecdote, it’s clear the author/recipe-developer assembled this salad with some random stuff lying around her fridge, but it’s a genius combination of crisp and tender vegetables, and vibrant flavors: the green spark of the mint, the strong garlic, the nuttiness of the oiled and baked eggplant cubes, the citrus bursts of the lemon juice and the tomatoes, the salty and earthy feta). I’d surely make this again.

I figure there are more, but if you can pronounce these five, you’re probably off to a good start as a valid New Yorker.

1. Fiorello
2. Gansevoort
3. Gowanus
4. Houston
5. Stuyvesant

Like everything else listworthy, there’s a list of songs about California on Wikipedia, but here are five of my favorites in my head as I fly out to that great state myself today. Per normal, you can listen to a watery mp3 of each song by clicking its title.

1. “California Dreamin’” by The Mamas & The Papas. Yes, it’s That Song, like the Stones’ “Paint it, Black,” overused by soundtrackers to evoke the dark, hippie-hedonism of the Sixties. But if you can forget that for a moment, it’s not too shabby a tune, with its magic harmonies, a bit of Byrds-y guitar chiming, empty-grain-silo reverb, and—is that a flute solo?
2. “California Soul” by Marlena Shaw. Funky!
3. “California Stars” by Billy Bragg and Wilco. Written by Woody Guthrie and put to music by Bragg (acoustic guitar) and Wilco (with Jeff Tweedy, also on acoustic guitar, and vocals). A dreamy, repetitive, strummy lullaby that paints pictures of starry nights that probably still exist in California’s desert places outside the city lights.
4. “California Sun” by the Ramones. Popularized by a surf group named the Rivieras and probably my favorite of the California Song remakes, which also include “California Girls” (The Beach Boys vs. David Lee Roth) and “Hotel California” (The Eagles vs. The Gipsy Kings, the Spanish version of which memorably graces The Big Lebowski.)
5. “Going to California” by Led Zeppelin. I went to college in the Midwest and Led Zeppelin IV was in constant rotation in the freshman dorms, typically by the guys who burned incense in their rooms for a variety of reasons and had one of those black banners featuring the ZoSo symbols and an excerpt from “Stairway” tacked up on their closet door. I’m alternately annoyed and enthralled by Robert Plant’s voice but on this one, the interweaving acoustic guitar and mandolin do it for me.

In light of the subway flooding last week, the mock MTA Service Alert reproduced below was making the rounds via email at work late last week. It’s clever and obviously produced by someone familiar with the vagaries of the New York City subway system.

An Important Message from the MTA

MTA New York City Transit

Service Alert

Posted on: 8/10/2007

Due to a single droplet of water falling from the sky mistaken for rain that was actually condensation from an air conditioner in a 17th floor apartment, there are delays on the following subway lines:

trains are running between 14th Street and 18th Street in both directions.

and uptown trains will terminate at 96th Street, as the conductors don’t feel like going to Harlem.

, , and trains will be making two loops around Central Park before getting you to your destination, because they need some fresh air.

trains are enjoying a hot dog and beer at Willets Point-Shea Stadium and will resume normal operation once the game is over.

, , and trains are not running at all, because they really just don’t have time for your crap today.

trains are running express in Manhattan, enjoying the nice cool breeze they get from going 30 miles an hour.

and trains are stuck in some neighborhood in Queens that you’ve never heard of.

trains are currently experiencing an inferiority complex and will not run until further notice/counseling.

, , and trains are running normally, of course, since nobody ever uses these trains.

trains are running between Princeton Junction and Hoboken. We really can’t explain how they ended up there.

and trains are currently running on the Cyclone track at Coney Island-Stillwell Ave.

and trains are feeling nostalgic right now, and are currently running over the Brooklyn Bridge.

service is suspended between Times Square-42nd Street and Grand Central-42nd Street. You can just walk. You do have legs, don’t you?

We would apologize for the inconvience, but we like to watch you suffer. Thank you for riding with MTA New York City Transit!

The timing was both good and bad for my cell phone to suddenly break late Friday night. Good because I was headed out of town for some quiet and relaxation. Bad because I’m on business in California Monday through Wednesday and absolutely require a cell phone while there. I couldn’t slack off on this one; I had to get it fixed right away. Begrudgingly, I stopped at a conveniently located AT&T store up on Long Island only to learn that I could only get a replacement for the still-under-full-warranty phone from special AT&T stores. One was in Manhattan, on 42nd between Fifth and Sixth across the street from the central branch of the New York Public Library. Unfortunately, today was the Dominican Republican Day Parade and it was on Sixth from 36th to 62nd. It took me a solid 15 minutes of jostling to cross the street there. The walk back was even more difficult, as the street I’d chosen to cross Sixth, 43rd, was in the process of getting locked down because of an (apparently) bloodied and unruly reveler who had attracted the full attention of a good half-dozen cops, one of whom shouted to the mostly Dominican crowd, “Can’t you people keep the peace for one day?” (“You people.” Ha ha! Good luck, New York City cops!)

Because of the ruckus, I walked up to Rockefeller Center, took a D to 59th Street and transferred to a 1 which appropriately contained nearly all Dominicans blowing whistles and chanting slogans loudly in Spanish.

I’d passed through cities and towns with bucolic names and rashes of strip malls yet had no clear idea where I was other than the enticing signage on the Long Island Railroad platforms indicating I was headed “to Points East.” I was in a rush at Penn Station and had no map, so I trusted the prerecorded voice of the conductor would tell me when to transfer at Huntington and when to depart at Smithtown.

It did, and later on the strip of beach where I found a smooth white rock that would have made Brâncusi smile, Tina crouched in a clearing among the pebbles and shells.

“Long Island is sort of shaped like a fish,” she explained, drawing it with her finger in the wet sand, the peninsulas of North and South Fork forming the tail fin, the arcs of North and South Shore its body. She indicated our position in Nissequogue, near the dorsal fin, and I realized that given the once-upon-a-time shipbuilding communities and whaling ports nearby, the fish is an apt simile for the country’s most populous island. Now, though, the ghost of Gatsby haunts the shores and forests of old-money packrats and nouveau riche commuters.

I’m neither and was there because I needed some R&R from the bustle and dirty-bomb paranoia of Manhattan and because Tina’s parents are in Italy for their first vacation in 10 years, so we had run of their sumptuous, spacious home, acquired for a steal-worthy sum in the ’60s and upkept by the shiny rewards of shrewd investments and a lucrative family-run scrap-metal business.

In the back yard, just past a pair of scraggly pines, the lawn drops off into a cliff, beyond which lies Long Island Sound.

Inside is tastefully weathered furniture, hardwood floors, a beautiful but unruly macaw and most immediately, a rowdy quintet of Brussels griffon, which sounds like the name of an investment bank but is in fact a toy breed dog with a face that appears to have been struck with a dictionary. Their eyes bug out, their noses are squashed and their tiny teeth are revealed in an underbite. Their breathing sounds labored and congested, like a fat man snoring, though they make a purring sound when they’re content. They did that protective thing where they barked at me and snapped at the back of my pant legs before ascertaining I wasn’t a threat, but after I’d left and returned to a room, the cycle began anew. I found that when I sat, they were more calm because I wasn’t 10-times taller than they were and they could easily investigate me, often by walking over, pawing and licking my ticklish self all at once, like a bum rush by a gang of slobbery Tribbles.

The recent looming of the Check Engine light in her Volkswagen convinced Tina to rent a car for the weekend until she had more time to take it to a garage, and Enterprise offered us the Pride of DiCaprio, a Toyota Prius, in Environmentally Concerned Gray. The gasoline-electric hybrid doesn’t appear much different than other midsize automatics, excepting its push-button starter and park buttons, with a tiny joystick-like gearshift mounted below. There’s an impressive-looking video display on the center of the dash that indicates the fuel consumption of the car in motion via advancing numbers and bar graphs. Tina didn’t like it. The acceleration was slow and throaty, with dodgy visibility out the bisected rear window.

We drove out to the furthest point of interest, Port Jefferson, where we toured the village center and encompassing park, then had cones of mint chocolate chip and Moose Tracks at Port Jefferson Frigate, billed as the largest ice cream/candy shop on Long Island. On our way back to Smithtown, we stopped by some more parks and nature preserves, via various Scenic Routes. In a spicy mood for dinner, we had enchiladas at a Spanish restaurant, Casa Luis. Back at the house, we watched the not incredibly thrilling Rear Window remake for teens, Disturbia, then half of the languidly paced Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I had a touch of trouble getting to sleep with the constant whir of crickets and cicadas outside the guest bedroom window. The next morning, after pointing out to Tina a dry shell left on a walnut tree by a molting cicada, I learned she’d never before noticed these exoskeleton-like curiosities. When I was a kid, we used to collect these; they were easy to stick in people’s hair without them noticing.

I’m not a huge environmentalist, just a minor one, although parts of the article in today’s Salon about the scourge of those ubiquitous plastic grocery bags alarmed me.

It made me think about two things: first, my friend Beth’s “everyday” bag, which her Mom crocheted for her out of strips of black, yellow, white and blue plastic grocery bags. I didn’t even realize what it was made of until I looked closely. It’s oddly stylish, lightweight but sturdy, water resistant and hews strongly to the second demand of the environmental credo, “reduce, reuse, recycle.” If you are crafty, check out this link to a Craft magazine link-roundup covering an array of totes and clothing one can make out of plastic grocery bags.

I also thought of designer Anya Hindmarch’s infamous canvas totes that are screen-printed in cursive with the smug sentence, "I'm not a plastic bag." They went on sale in Britain in April for $15 apiece but are now showing up on eBay for as much as $300. I’ve now seen them over the shoulders of fashionable young ladies on the subway and the streets here in New York, so I can tell you they have reached Full Popularity Status.

The inevitable reprisal item, as noted by Salon’s brief article on Hindmarch, has already appeared with British designer Marissa Vandersee’s “I’m not a smug twat” bag. Me, if my Babel-Fishy French is correct, I’d like to see a canvas bag emblazoned with the Magritte-like statement, “Ce n'est pas un sac de toile.” I’d tote that.

Studies peg various society’s belief in ghosts at 50%, at least according to one of those factoids that pops up on the tiny TV screens in the elevators of my office building. Coincidentally I finally read Don DeLillo’s novella from 2001, The Body Artist, today on the subway, and I think it’s a ghost story.

A newly widowed woman is the “body artist” of the title. She’s sort of living piece of performance art, possibly like Kafka’s Hunger Artist, and who is able to change the shape and character of her body, taking on the voice and mannerisms of others. This isn’t fully revealed until late in the book, which I didn’t fully understand.

She spends most of the book in the lonely old house near a shore soon after her screenwriter husband’s suicide and soon finds a wan man-child who seems displaced in time and able to mimic her husband’s mannerisms and voice at times.

The language is more sparse, often vague, and always poetic, every word chosen precisely, than I remember from the DeLillo I read in college (but that was long ago).

With the dead husband in the book a screenwriter, might the book be making a meta-statement? Finishing it, I was reminded of a quote from awhile back by Laurie Anderson:

That’s what books are really. Talking to ghosts. It’s the way that the dead talk to the living.

Storms this morning washed out the full function of nearly every line in the subway system and on the streets, irritated commuters fought for cabs and clustered among dozens waiting for full busses that didn’t stop.

My own 1 train made it downtown to 137th Street before going out of service due to flooding. After a pair of halfhearted attempts waiting for a bus, I decided to walk, and surprised myself when I was able to make the entire 100 blocks without sore feet or tiring. It took about an hour and 45 minutes, though I did stop for a cinnamon raisin bagel and some orange juice at H&H Bagels on the Upper West Side.

After work, after buying a plum-colored polo shirt from American Apparel to replace my sweaty work shirt, I met up with Andie, her coworker Ian and some of his friends at Therapy, a gay bar/lounge in Hell’s Kitchen. We were there to watch So You Think You Can Dance, which the bar broadcasts on a large screen on the second floor. Here are Andie and Ian, voguing during a commercial break.

The dancing was impressive but I think this is one of those shows that requires a long-term investment in the characters to vote accurately and consistently for the “best” dancing.

For dinner I had a turkey burger and fries, which were not bad, and two mojitos, that were also not bad but extremely expensive. I was most impressed by the fishbowl of free, elusive NYC Condoms at the door.

Therapy

• 348 W. 52nd St.
• (212) 397-1700
• Meal 33 of 52: turkey burger and fries ($11.07) and two mojitos ($18.45).

Ginormous is among the nearly 100 new words and senses of existing words that will be included in the 2007 edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary this fall. It’s a portmanteau word, snapping-together giant and enormous to mean “extremely large.” Why either of those two words can’t suffice for this new Kindergarten construction is unclear to me.

In terms of new words for size, I will rejoice only when embiggen makes the cut for the dictionary. It’s on its way. Scientific American noted late last month that embiggen, a word that debuted in a 1996 episode of The Simpsons, appeared in a paper by Stanford University physicist Shamit Kachru, “the most prominent younger researchers working on string theory.” Kachru suggests he included the word, which he defines as “to enlarge or expand in size,” because The Simpsons is “a source of knowledge for all serious theoretical physicists.”

Go fake word, go!

By now, you’ve probably heard of this study from the Stanford University School of Medicine in which preschoolers overwhelmingly declared that McDonald’s food tasted better than the same food placed in plain wrappers. I await the follow-up study in which preschoolers declare poster paint “delicious” and reveal that the Gorton’s fisherman hides in their bedroom closet at night.

Of course most kids are going to say McDonald’s food tastes better. They’re also going to claim Coke tastes better than Sam’s Choice Cola and that Honey Nut Cheerios taste better than the store-brand equivalent (“Sugar-Shellacked Oat Tori”), because they believe commercials, because they watch too much TV and because their parents buy them the scrapple they clamor for.

I recall junk food advertised more heavily when I was a kid, but I think I escaped most of its charms because, at the risk of making my family and I seem even more like colorectal Family Values politicians, my parents laid down the law, reserving fast food meals for special, occasional treats, and limiting commercial television consumption.

As hinted here before, as an impressionable youngster, mainly I watched commercial-free shows on PBS such as All Creatures Great and Small, 3-2-1 Contact, The Electric Company, Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, as well as cuddly family-fare sitcoms like The Cosby Show and Murder, She Wrote, which may explain why I didn’t have many friends as a child, seeing as I was unable to chime-in on playground conversations about who shot J.R. or the coolness of the newest Duran Duran video. And although I did get my fair after-school share of G.I. Joe and Transformers, I also got a healthy jolt of classic Warner Bros. cartoons, which opened my eyes to cross dressing rabbits, pigs that sing “Moonlight Bay” and shotgun-toting hunters with speech impediments. (I must say, I’m a more confident New Yorker having been educated early by Looney Tunes about life’s grotesqueries and idiosyncrasies.)

My TV intake was leavened further by reading. Oh, I was a precocious youth, reading as a Kindergartner, volunteering at the local library in grade school, and plowing through perhaps hundreds of books. At home, in addition to Highlights (“Fun with a Purpose!”), my magazine reading included my Dad’s copies of Consumer Reports, the theme of which is that food and other objects in name brand packaging is not necessarily as good or as price-effective as similar items in other packaging.

But enough about me. This story has a happy ending in that, as most parents will tell you, it’s easy to play off preschoolers’ small minds in a positive way, like how you can tell them that their dead hamster is in heaven and that cursing is “wrong” because “I said so.” For you see, the Stanford study found that fruits, vegetables and milk in McDonald’s packaging also tasted great to kids. Under fire for peddling crap to kids, McDonald’s, realizes this as well, and now only heavily promotes Happy Meals that contain fruit and food with fewer calories and less fat. Now all the company needs to do is brand exercise with its golden arches so kids think that’s cool, too, and we’ll have the Childhood Obesity Epidemic licked.

I caught another free concert at McCarren Park Pool this afternoon with Beth and friends. As before, we delighted in spotting noteworthy fashions among the crowd both impressive and wayward, including bikini-clad ladies in cowboy boots, some dude in corduroy short-pants and two sets of sneakers featuring an eye-searing array of DayGlo.

After sitting around near the back of the pool to better people-watch and listen to the openers (one of which resembled the Polyphonic Spree and covered Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” to much delight and confetti), we moved front and center for the headliner, Blonde Redhead. As the crowd waited for the band to take the stage, the guy to the left with the shaved head and the foam earplugs was engrossed in EJ Hobsbawm’s potboiler, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality while the girl to the right wormed her way through a soduku. The guy directly in front of us, in shades and curly blonde hair, grabbed any beach balls that bounced his way, deflated them and snuck them into his backpack.

I’d heard of Blonde Redhead but hadn’t heard them until today, very lush in both lowercase and capitalized forms of the word, blending Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, with ethereal vocals by a self-admittedly drink-addled Kazu Makino (depicted below), and from the Pace brothers, washes of electric guitar with odd effects and solid, crafty drumbeats, plus a few odd synths and samples thrown into the mix.

After refreshments at a local bar, Beth, her sister Katie, their friend Brett and I were famished and spotting a restaurant name similar enough to the girls’ own last name made the selection of Raymund’s Place automatic. It featured an animal skull mounted festively on the wall, which pleased Beth, and served Polish home cooking. We feasted on potato pancakes, beet soup and pierogies, those doughy lumps of goodness I remember fondly from Parma, Ohio. The pierogies at Raymund arrive not only with a bit of sour cream, but a small side of bacon bits nestled in their own liquid grease: genius.

Raymund’s Place

• 124 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn
• (718) 388-4200
• Meal 32 of 52: potato and cheese pierogies with cucumber salad and beets ($6.75).

I haven’t seen many films that have been able to nail the elusive character of the prototypical hard-boiled New Yorker, that mixture of gumption, aggravation and good humor, but The Taking of Pelham One Two Three gets close. Film Forum snuck it into its “NYC Noir” five-week festival but it’s not especially noirish. First, with such snappy and funny dialogue, it’s more of a comedy. It’s not even in black and white as Sherry and I had assumed but simmering with the alternately grim and garish hues of mid-’70s Manhattan, the latter best exemplified by Walter Matthau’s lemon-yellow necktie and a button-down shirt patterned in a multicolored checkerboard pattern resembling the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever.

Matthau plays a exasperated yet savvy lieutenant in the MTA’s police division whose workday takes an unexpected turn when he learns a subway car’s been hijacked and the passengers are being held for a $1 million ransom. For a film focusing mostly on this non action-packed standoff (and surprisingly little on the hostages, which are stock characters), the storyline managed to keep my attention, not only by slowly revealing how the four hijackers are planning on escaping with $1 million from a subway tunnel, but by bringing to life the city-worker characters: the salty coworkers of Matthau’s, the cranky flu-ridden mayor (the Koch-like Lee Wallace), and various cops bound by procedure and red tape.

After post-movie drinks downtown, instead of taking the subway home, which would have been only appropriate after watching perhaps the greatest New York City subway movie ever made, I took a cab, which I almost never do. I don’t recall seeing one of these before but my cab had a TV screen built into the back seat to bombard me with commercials, though at a push of the touch-screen, brought up a map that refreshed every few seconds to show the position of the cab as a green dot. Not very useful to me but mesmerizing anyway.

The Smoke Joint, a new BBQ place in Fort Greene, has been getting press lately over what “style” of barbecue it serves. Where another rib place would drawl on about Texas or Tennessee, the guys at Smoke Joint have seen it fit to reply, bluntly, that their BBQ is “Brooklyn style,” whatever that might be. Even after eating it, I don’t know, other than it’s cheap and delicious and I’d get it again. Juicy, spicy and tender summed up my “tips and bits,” which didn’t seem to be a hearty portion for $7 at first, but which probably works out to nearly a rack of ribs, without the bones and large fat deposits.

The styling of the place is as no-nonsense as the food: functional-basic décor, regular tables and chairs with a semienclosed, sort-of porch area sticking out into the sidewalk and napkins that appear to be the same tri-fold paper towels dispensed in restrooms. Even the soundtrack is straight-up classic radio: Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps,” the Raspberries’ “Go All the Way,” Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” and the 11-minute-plus version of Traffic’s “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys.”

The Smoke Joint

• 87 S. Elliott Place, Brooklyn
• (718) 797-1011
• Meal 31 of 52: “Tips and Bits” ($7), a beer ($4) and BBQ beans ($3).

Headline

“Breaking News: Jason Young Replaces Bob Callahan as CEO of Ziff Davis”

S.

I didn’t know you were in the running.

Jason

Yes, thanks to that persistent corporate recruiting firm. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my tenure here, but Ziff Davis has those really comfy Aeron chairs everywhere, not just in their conference room.

S.

I like the cinder block they gave me.

Cherries ’n Cream Stewart’s soda, which I drank for the first time this afternoon, tastes just like cherry pie filling, which tastes just like Haribo Twin Cherries, which taste just like a dessert my mom used to make for my birthday called Cherry Parfait, which was essentially cherry pie filling spread atop French vanilla pudding. I like cherry pie filling flavor. It may be my favorite artificial flavor.