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

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

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

He explains:

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

....

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

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

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

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

Please be courteous to your coworkers.

Place all dishes to be washed in the dishwasher.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(image via the New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

There’s a mouse in my house and he had the gall and impressive dexterity to lick the peanut butter from the trap I’d set without springing it. So I brought in the big guns and borrowed Paddington the Cat tonight from his mistress, Kelly. We’ll see if he can get the job done. . .with extreme prejudice.

Postscript: Although I have located no mouse carcass, I believe Paddington scared away the mouse. At least for a while. Paddy definitely knew there was a mouse afoot; I caught him at times crouching and staring intently into the crevice between my kitchen counter and wall where I’d imagined a mouse might hide.

My Dad’s an electrical engineer with FirstEnergy so I felt him qualified to comment on this article about a cat and mouse that got electrocuted and caused a widespread power outage in Albania.

Dad

I don’t know anything about the Albanian power grid, but I’m having trouble thinking of a scenario where a cat and mouse, running “into an area of high-voltage cables and [getting] electrocuted,” would cause a widespread outage. Cables near the ground are insulated and won’t electrocute you. Cables on poles or on substation structures are not a high cat/mouse traffic area and the insulators would generally be too big to allow electrocution of small mammals. Where the insulators are smaller, we’ve had suicidal raccoons and squirrels (but not chasing each other) that have caused local outages, but not an entire city.

Jason

Didn’t you also have plagues of amorous mayflies?

Dad

We had enough playful mayflies swarming around an insulator 10 feet tall that they caused a short circuit. Now that was impressive. Those mayflies must have really thought having sex was exciting and they die shortly thereafter anyway, so why not go out “with a bang.”

Jason

World’s Ugliest Dog? My vote goes to Pee Wee Martini. (Best viewed while not eating.)

H.

I like Elwood. Figures, he’s from NJ.

Jason

I wonder if he suffers from dry tongue with it lolling like that all the time.

H.

Or maybe he just ate some peanut butter.

Jason

Yes. Or he took a quick hit from the ugly stick. (No worries: the ASPCA dictates that all Ugly Sticks must be made from Nerf brand polyurethane.)

H.

No wonder dogs bite people.

I love this illustration of an apparently cross, ancient frog standing off against his much more minute, modern-day counterpart, not the least of which because the big guy is characterized “as big as a bowling ball.” (Now that that phrase has reached popular status, I’ve got to stop referring to certain objects “as big as a ladies bowling ball,” as I often will.)

No, I mainly like the illustration because of the scale-establishing pencil thrown in there half-heartedly. I want to see the little guy grab it and use it as a weapon against the big guy; stab him in the air sac or something.

While Kelly’s frolicking in Cancún for her birthday, I’m catsitting Paddington. I appreciated these Post-it notes she affixed to two of the bottles atop her refrigerator. If you can’t make out Kelly’s handwriting from my photo, the one on the right is affixed to an amaretto bottle and reads:

This is not amaretto
It’s whiskey
.... Long Story

The one on the left is affixed to a whiskey bottle and reads:

This is not
whiskey. It’s Bacardi.
God

That Kelly felt the need(?) to label her liquor made me laugh, but also because, yes, there probably is a good story behind these shenanigans.

On my flight home to Cleveland for the holidays, I read in today’s New York Times an article “Guess Who’s Minding the Store” by Kate Hammer) revealing that owners of delis and bodegas in New York City are not supposed to own in-store cats. At least two of them do in my neighborhood (the kids love ’em!) and I guess it makes sense that both the city’s health code and state law forbid animals in places where food or beverages are sold for human consumption.

But as the article notes, bodegas are also not supposed to have rats. Realizing that the $300 fine from a health inspector for the first offense of having a cat is the same as the fee for the same inspector finding rodent feces, many bodega owners have decided to gamble with keeping their cats on staff. But although the city recognizes that even the smell of cats in an enclosed area will keep mice away, it figures the risk of consumables contaminated by a cat is greater, hence the law.

Related: Working Class Cats, a blog about kitties working in big cities.

I heard a thin metallic scraping from my hotel room balcony this morning in San Francisco. Peeking through the curtain, I watched a seagull the size of a mailbox investigate the large sheet of tinfoil that had covered my bowl of room-service clam chowder from dinner last night. Apparently a creamy seafood residue remained because once the gull got a grip on the foil, he alighted unsteadily with his shiny treasure towards the Bay Bridge.

Taking out my trash this afternoon, I came upon Rodolfo, the building’s super, sitting out back on the patio with two roosters. A friendly fellow with a shaved head and omnipresent cigar, Rodolfo explained that he ran into some friends in the park who asked if he wanted the roosters and he thought, why not. So now they bunk in the building’s basement adjoining his apartment. He feeds them corn and sometimes bread, lets them roam around in the garden, and hoses them down when it’s hot and sunny like today.

The young one is two months old and spends most of his time flopped on the ground, as if still exhausted from the rigors of birth. But when I tried to pick him up, he came alive and darted around in annoyance, then stood just out of reach to bob his head and train a beady eye on me to gauge the possibility of further encroachment.

The older one is six months old and already the archetype rooster, with regal red comb, a frisson of earth-tone feathers covering his neck, wings and bulbous body, and sticklike yellow legs ending in feet with curiously elastic toes. He seems to spend most of his time preening and investigating bits of gravel and cigarette butts as potential food sources.

I asked Rodolfo, who’s from the Dominican Republic and whose English isn’t great but a dictionary better than my Spanish, if the older rooster was crowing yet. He didn’t understand my verb, so I said, “Is he, you know—cock-a-doodle-doo!”

Rodolfo laughed and said not yet, confirming that the onomatopoeia is different in Spanish: “In my country, every day at 5 a.m., quiquiriquí!”

Saturday, September 29, 2007 Update: I heard a rooster crow for the first time today. It happened at 11 a.m. Let’s hope it stays that way.

I caught the Frogs: A Chorus of Colors exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History this afternoon in its last day. In addition to being a confusing space with not enough directional signage in general, the frog exhibit had some of the worst graphic and typographic design ever, with conflicting hard-to-read fonts (and too many of them), rainbow-gradient horizontal spacers reminiscent of a webpage from 12 years ago, and the florescent palette of the Ocean Pacific clothing line, circa 1987.

Many of my questions went answered by the explanatory text on the placards. Do poisonous frogs secrete poison at will or is it on their skin all the time? At what point is a predator going to stop eating a poisonous frog? (I’d think a good chomp from a bird would be enough to permanently disable both predator and prey, which crimps the Darwinian cycle and doesn’t do either party any good.) A placard on mating noted the embrace lasts anywhere from a few hours to a few days, but didn’t mention how frogs might avoid predators the whole time they’re doin’ it in this sitting-duck stance. Also, what’s with the weird names? The Kermit-colored fellow pictured above? Waxy Monkey Tree Frog. No, I don’t get it, either, and that was one of the more normal names. I’m aware that you or I can find the answers to these questions and so much more on the internet, but when I’m paying $15 for an exhibit, I’d like it explained to me then and there, and via an eye-appealing design.

The frogs themselves, on the other hand, are pretty cool, although they don’t do much. Occasionally, I saw one slowly making its way down a tree trunk, or breathing, but mostly they sat there, unblinking. The poisonous ones were the most active and also the most colorful, although some of the others featured such an unnatural shade and sheen of green that they seemed to have been molded from plastic. I expected that if I turned one over, raised text on its underside would indicate “Made in China.”

I think as a general rule, larval is the most disturbing stage of animal development. Maggots, for instance, get no love, other than from hungry birds and reptiles. In the case of frogs, tadpoles are creepy, those translucent, featureless fluke-like beings that propel themselves through water by some strange magic. “They look like fish,” mused someone. “They’re not fish! They’re tadpoles!” piped the precocious human larva who’d earlier demonstrated that by smacking the plexiglas terrariums, she could annoy the smaller frogs enough that they’d hop. In fact there were many children running around the exhibit area, wreaking havoc. Is it possible this show was geared toward kids and that’s why I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have?

Shifting the day to more adult activities, I stopped by Blondies Sports Bar, which is the place to be if you wish to root for your favorite sports team while wearing the jersey of your favorite sports team, as many were today for the Browns/Steelers game. Because the Browns were getting crushed and the place was packed tighter than a rush-hour subway car, I retreated back to Amsterdam for a late brunch at Monaco.

Monaco

• 421 Amsterdam Ave. (at the corner of West 80th Street
• (212) 873-3100
• Meal 40 of 52: goat cheese and portobello mushroom omelet, with home fries and wheat toast ($12.50) and two mojitos ($9 each).

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’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.

My coworker thought I was nuts for photographing these ducks, which were wandering around a parking lot in Orlando. But they don’t look like any ducks I’ve ever seen. I mean, look at ’em. They appear to be wearing little red luchador masks.

Katie and I took part in 19th-annual MS Walk organized by the Greater North Jersey Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. It was held at Liberty State Park, which affords fine views of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. In fact, I don’t remember seeing this on past trips to Ellis Island but there’s a hidden service road built on a pier that extends from the park to the rear of Ellis Island, presumably for swift delivery of employees, exhibits, merchandise, food and other supplies.

I used to walk and run in events like these more often and I can tell you they usually have water stations, particularly because you’re dealing with a bunch of amateurs. But there weren’t any and it was a bright, sunny day. I cursed myself for not bringing any and for instead having consumed a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and donut, which I assumed would give the sugar I needed to get me going in the morning. It wasn’t enough refreshment but at the halfway point, there was a child’s plastic swimming pool filled with ice and generic soda, and a picnic table lined with sandwich cookies and crackers and “energy bars” suspiciously reminiscent of candy.

Later, Katie and I drove out to the wilds of New Jersey where her horse lives. Here’s a photo of Colandi looking sassy in her summer coat.

A few weeks back I spotted a cockroach perched near the edge of a shelf on my newly assembled bookcase, so I whomped it with a beefy rolled-up issue of Vanity Fair. It crumpled like an aluminum can and none of its appendages twitched, which satisfied me that it wouldn’t be going anywhere just then other than hell.

I stepped away to grab the trashcan and when I turned back to the bookcase to dispose of the corpse IT WAS GONE. It had not fallen to the floor. It had not staggered off to die fully behind a David Foster Wallace hardcover. It was not to be found anywhere, which was eerie and a total horror movie setup. I thought I would turn my head very slowly and see the cockroach lounging on my love seat, uninjured and grown as large and surly as Orson Welles. Or the script would read: "Later that night as Jason sleeps, vengeful cockroaches swarm into his orifices and snack on his organs, much to his consternation."

Anyway, I was reminded of this today when I read a recent Scientific American article on zombie cockroaches, which do exist. Hardy little fuckers. I will now be unsurprised yet still very, very disappointed if I find that mangled bug hiding out in my Raisin Bran.

From the “Tables For Two” restaurant review of Boqueria by Leo Carey in the December 18th New Yorker:

The deep, vinegary tang of a lentil stew is heightened with ingeniously thin round crisps of Serrano ham—porcine Communion wafers—and poached egg.

The phrase is superfluous but “porcine Communion wafers” might be so bad it rounds the circle to goodness again.

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 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.

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.

Katie and I headed into the wilds of New Jersey this morning to the farm where she keeps her horse. It’s nestled amid rolling hills clustered with vivid autumn foliage and there’s a farmhouse, stables, silo, goober stable-hands and a rascally golden-haired dog who’s always getting into trouble. Very storybook. I was introduced to some of the riders and their horses, both new and longtime, and with all the comings and goings and gossip, I’m convinced a horse farm would be a perfect setting for the next reality series.

I brought along a bag each of carrots and starlight mints. Horses do like peppermint, but candy isn’t good for their teeth. It’s also not good for human teeth, but we have capacity for higher thought and opposable thumbs so it’s tougher to keep us away.

When feeding a horse a carrot, Katie told me to offer it grasped in my fist. Handing off the carrot in the traditional fashion exposes carrot-shaped fingers to an animal that may not appreciate the difference, and listening to the crunching sounds amplified through that giant skull further convinced me not to tempt fate or the safety of my digits.

I found that it’s also not a good idea to dangle the remaining bag of carrots in plain sight. I got nosed several times for additional carrots, which was still cute despite the fact that the snout was attached to a creature that weighs as much as a Volkswagen.

I learned other things. Don’t walk behind a horse because you can get kicked accidentally. And anyway, walking aside a horse lets it keep an eye on you and any carrots you might have hidden in your coat.

Horses will piss and drop loads of crap with little or no notice. I also was amused by the power and duration of horse farts. It reminded me of a few guys I knew in college.

Horses have eyelashes. I don’t know what made me think they wouldn’t.

Like detailing a car, cleaning a horse is a time-consuming process because of the extensive surface area. There’s currying, brushing, washing, picking dirt and stones from hooves and inspecting for tick bites. Insect repellant for horses smells like Murphy Oil Soap.

Katie let me test-drive her horse as she lead it, which was a thrill. She had it move faster for a few spells which was not as much fun because my nuts got jostled and squished. Is this why cowboys were such solitary men?

Katie and her posse visited the Pollock-Krasner House a week ago and she told me that the floor of the studio out back is still spattered with paint: a work of art in itself. (You can walk on it, but you have to wear special slippers.) If ever an artist exemplified intense external emotion best, it’s Pollock. His works are segments of chaos, almost as if that slung paint could go on forever if not for the constraints of the canvas.

I thought about this today as I toured an exhibit of Joseph Cornell’s art from the ’30s through the ’60s on display at the Katonah Museum of Art in the hamlet of Katonah, New York.

Self-contained and insular in his life and art, Cornell is the polar opposite of Pollock. His works demonstrate emotion too, of course, but of reflection or longing, via assemblages he built inside handmade wooden boxes, and more fantastically, inside pocketwatches, antique books and blue-glassed specimen boxes. He’d stock these containers with Boo Radley curios from a lifetime of collecting and hoarding at antique shops and five-and-dime stores. An automobile watchcase contains a tiny silver spoon, fork and knife, with a thin spiral of copper metal and crumbs of pyrite. In a homage to Magritte, Cornell cut uniform coaster-sized discs from photos of the sky and from the pages of a book in French, stacking them neatly in a paperboard powder box along with a lens flecked with white paint.

He spent most of his life holed up in a house in Queens with his mother, crippled brother and an encyclopedic knowledge of art, science, the cinema, ballet, literature, theatre, music and history. He admired actresses and made themed boxed artworks for them. A related work on display at the exhibit, The Crystal Cage (Portrait of Berenice), is a valise box containing detritus from the life of a fictional character: dozens of postcards and photos, a prayer card and a claim ticket, maps, a calendar page from Saturday, August 17, and a tarnished penny.

After Marcel Duchamp befriended and hired him in the early 1940s, Cornell built boxes for the great dadaist’s boîte-en-valise series. One of these on display contains 69 reproductions of Duchamp’s most famous works, including miniature replicas of the Large Glass, a urinal and the Mona Lisa with a moustache.

On my train ride back to Manhattan, a blind couple boarded, each led by a harnessed Labrador retriever trained for public transport. As soon as the couple found free seats, the dogs flattened their bodies and squirmed underneath. Then the man reached down and tucked in his dog’s tail and left rear leg, which were intruding into the aisle. The dogs didn’t appear comfortable with their lack of headroom and the man’s yellow Lab had the doleful look of an animal resigned to its duty. Its head poked into the footspace of the seat behind the couple and the guy there gently bonked the dog’s snout with his shoe by accident before realizing the animal was there. When the couple rose to exit at White Plains, the dogs squeezed out and it appeared as if they were being birthed from the floor of the train.

Last Friday, ornithologists at the Max Planck Society reported that birds born in a city are more resistant (probably even genetically resistant) to acute stress than forest dwelling birds.

In their lab, the scientists raised two groups of blackbird nestlings: one collected from downtown Munich, the other from a forest 25 miles outside the city. After a year of restful existence, the birds were captured in cotton bags and handled. As might have been expected, all of the birds freaked out from this jarring interruption. But as the stressors were reapplied every four months thereafter, the reaction of the urban blackbirds was considerably more relaxed than their country cousins.

So, say the scientists: city life alters a blackbird’s physiological coping mechanisms. This is fascinating and begs the question: how does stress-response compare between native New Yorkers and those of us like myself who moved here from bucolic environs? Further study is warranted, although I admit it may be tough to capture us in large cotton bags.

New York City is a snack bar for migrating birds! Like most New Yorkers, I suspected that most of the city’s parks were for recreational purposes, like dog walking, jogging, mugging and selling “smoke,” but every spring and fall, songbirds migrating up and down the East Coast make New York’s parks a destination for resting and wolfing down bugs and berries.

According to the Times article on this topic that I read yesterday, the birds can increase their body mass by 20% or more in a day or two, the equivalent of a human gaining 40 pounds in the same timespan. The extra fat allows the birds to continue their migration. Fascinating!

The other night, standing on the stoop and fiddling with my cell phone, I caught a glimpse of the largest raccoon I’ve ever seen.

Normally, a Manhattan city street is no place for such an animal to skulk, other than perhaps a rat. But as I stood still at a slight distance and watched, I saw that this raccoon had figured it all out.

Whenever there’s construction on the facade of a building in New York, a frequent occurrence, the construction guys erect a sidewalk shed, a temporary pedestrian passageway built from tall poles bolted into the ground with sheets of plywood and corrugated metal forming a roof, to protect folks from potentially falling debris. This raccoon had secreted himself in a little nook near the roof of one of these structures that was recently assembled just outside our apartment building. After waiting until he discerned no passers-by, he deftly climbed down to scavenge for food in the open garbage cans for our building just below.

Tonight, I went out again and this time I had my camera. I waited a few minutes and chanced to see him stealthily descend into a garbage can, rustle around and emerge with a chunk of bread in his mouth. He climbed back out and stashed the bread somewhere (or ate it quickly; this guy does a lot of eating by the looks of things) then crept around a ledge that runs the inside perimeter of the construction-structure’s roof.

After I retreated, he went back to ransacking the garbage, just as a family (mom, dad and young daughter) walked by. I was standing off to the side, on the stoop of the building next to ours, to see what would happen and sure enough the family was startled by the raccoon. He stared at them, and they at him, then retreated to his crawlspace. They saw me observing the scene and the dad asked me, with an accent (French? Italian?), what that animal was called. “A raccoon,” I said. “Is this a wild animal?” he asked. “Yeah,” I said. “Probably came over from the park.” I gestured toward Riverside, a few hundred feet away.

Initially I thought it was crazy that someone wouldn’t know what a raccoon was, but I’ve since read they’re strictly a North American animal, and one that I don’t imagine gets seen much in New York City.

Eric arrived this evening on his way to pick up Andie and Katie at the airport to collect the cats. I’ll miss them. Like human houseguests, they were equally annoying and fun to have around. Writing about them was like shooting fish in a barrel. Ooo, make that catfish.

All I have to remember them by are the blog entries and the container of Caribbean Catch Tuna Flavor Pounce that I bought for them, which got the least enthusiastic reception I’ve ever seen from a cat-snack product. When I plunked two of the tiny fish-shaped treats on the floor, the cats merely sniffed them and sulked off, as if I had tried to feed them a pair of dice.

As an average American, you’ve probably heard by now, probably on the local news while you were eating most of a bag of Lay’s KC Masterpiece BBQ Flavored Potato Chips, that the USDA has issued a colorful new food pyramid to recommend the sorts and amounts of foods we eat.

Back in 2000 or so, the last time the USDA revised the pyramid and the accompanying recommended dietary guidelines, I was working for the candy magazines and got to experience the intense lobbying by the various food industries that goes into constructing these things.

The cattlemen want meat emphasized. The grain farmers would like to regain a shred of their pre-Atkins glory and are recommending running over the cattlemen with their combines; also, eating a diet rich in hearty whole grains. The pistachio growers, who throw great parties, are pointing out the tasty benefits of nuts. And the candy industry’s mantra is that its products can be a part of a balanced diet. No one wants anything in the guidelines that’s the slightest bit negative about their food interest. Believe me when I tell you that the food industries are the architects of the pyramid or, at least, the shady subcontractors who install inferior drywall, to overextend a metaphor.

So the food pyramid and the dietary guidelines are a joke. But I don’t despair because all I need to know about diet and exercise I’ve learned from observing Katie’s cats.

Ariel gets plenty of exercise, speeding around the apartment and rebounding off various pieces of furniture. Even with this active lifestyle, she eats sparingly. She is as streamlined a kitty as you’ll ever hope to see. In fact, she looks more like a meerkat than a cat, particularly when she hears someone out in the hallway and she sits up to listen more intently.

Lily, however, who Katie told me is two pounds overweight, has a more relaxed lifestyle. She prefers sitting to moving and when she does move, it’s usually slowly, with frequent breaks, much as a teamster might move. I try to get her to move about by playing with her using one of those string-on-a-long-stick cat toys, which sort of works. She rises up on her haunches to lunge and bat at the string, reminding me of those burly gentlemen in pro football—linemen, I believe they’re called—who rear up like grizzlies and attempt to swat down field goal attempts by the opposing team.

She is intensely interested in eating, thinking that every time I make a move to the kitchen, it just might be to get her some food, despite repeated evidence to the contrary. When it is feeding time, she gets very excited, meowing and trying to trip me up, presumably so I drop her bowl full of food that it might reach her faster. She chows down with vigor while stealing glances at Ariel’s bowl, like it’s a race to the finish. But Ariel never finishes her food, just a few quick bites, then off for more darting about. I must remove the uneaten portion or else Lily snarfs it down.

So there you have it: eat less and exercise for better health. It works for cats, so I can only assume that with some limited testing on a group of human subjects, we can prove it can work for them, too.

While I was at work, Eric, who doesn’t have a printer for his PowerBook at his apartment, stopped by to print out some documents on our printer. And it was probably a good thing he did. When I got home, I saw he had left a note for me, mentioning his visit. At the bottom of the note, he added:

PS. The little cat was locked in the bathroom. I hope it was okay to let him out. He pooped in the tub. I threw it out but didn’t clean tub.

Lest you think I’m some sort of cat-abusing bastard, I should point out that both cats were freely roaming around when I left this morning, and, in fact, tried to escape out the front door when I opened it, as they always do. And although our bathroom door doesn’t have a lock, Ariel (the little one) must have managed to either close the door behind her or the wind blew it shut. Henceforth, I am keeping the bathroom clear of cats and the door shut to prevent further mishaps while I’m out.

And yes, I cleaned the tub.

After this excitement, I decided to let the cats have some quality time. The burglar bars on my bedroom window swing open to allow access to the fire escape, so I left the bars open for a bit for the cats to lie on the sill and take in the sights and the breeze. They got a real treat: a pigeon roosting on the fire escape must have realized that the cats were unlikely to lunge at him through the window’s screen, so he stayed put, smugly. The cats, needless to say, were very interested in the pigeon, staring intensely at him and emitting growly “must eat bird” cat noises.

While Andie, Katie and their parents are on vacation in Belize, I’m watching Katie’s cats, Lily and Ariel. She dropped them off at the apartment tonight and it didn’t take too much snooping around for them to ease into their new surroundings. They already enjoy sightseeing from the windowsill and conducting brief excursions in my closet and under my bed.

Ariel, the younger one that’s small and scrappy, enjoys ripping down our long hallway, building up speeds approaching 35 MPH as she brakes by skidding sharply on the hardwood floor or, alternately, by banking sideways off the back of the couch as a skateboarder might. Her other major hobby seems to be getting her head accidentally clamped in the refrigerator. Don’t fret, because this hasn’t happened, nor am I trying to clamp her head in the refrigerator; it’s just that every time I open the door, she rushes over to see what’s up and I’m not used to checking for cats when I close the refrigerator.

Lily, the porky, somewhat football-shaped older one, has been taking it easy and has taken to testing the various flat surfaces in the apartment to determine which are most ideal for napping. She seems to favor our living room table.

Tomorrow will be the cats’ first extended time alone in the apartment and when I get home from work, it will be interesting to see what they have knocked over.

I went clothes shopping tonight after work, but couldn’t find anything worthy at Filene’s Basement or TJ Maxx. But then, what was I expecting? I did catch what appeared to be the last gasp of Banana Republic’s Winter Sale and although I couldn’t locate any sassy shirts or pants I liked, I purchased a somber grey Italian wool tie for $11, a super savings over BR’s usual $60-$70 tie price. Went to Academy and bought a small armload of used CDs (Björk, Nick Drake, Madonna, Mogwai, Pixies, The Police, The Smiths, Sonic Youth [two CDs from them] and The Stone Roses) then had dinner with Jimi around 8 p.m. at Harry’s Burritos.

I had previously agreed to watch Jimi’s cats (Patch Kit, Cricket and Stupid) while he’s on vacation in New Orleans this weekend, as well as when he’s in Cleveland on business next weekend, so we reviewed their feeding and care procedures. (The dogs, Couscous and Bingo, are staying with a woman Jimi met through craigslist, a statuesque, six-foot-tall blonde who used to be a TV news anchor in Anchorage.)

Jimi feeds his cats thrice daily, and Stupid, who’s arthritic, needs to get a pill with his food during two of those feedings, so I’ve more or less decided I’ll just stay over at Jimi’s while he’s away. Jimi is OK with this as long as I don’t pawn his thousands of dollars worth of computer, stereo and video equipment. He is even laundering his sheets and providing clean towels. It will be like a mini vacation, only in a noisier and somewhat colder neighborhood than most vacation spots. I’ve also decided that staying at Jimi’s will be conducive for scoping out restaurants and trying a few of them for the purposes of The 52 Meals Project. New places to eat would also be welcome because, as the perceptive among you have noticed, I spend an awful lot of time at Harry’s Burritos whenever I’m in the Village.