A while back I wrote a short post titled “Whatcha Gonna Do?” about my thoughts about what it would take to survive as a homeless person. Now somebody started a whole blog about that : “Survival Guide to Homelessness”. I may know how to make my own caffeinated mouthwash, but this dude has be beat at making his own adult wipes.
Month: October 2004
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How Are We Gonna Live a Few Years Without a Total Lunar Eclipse?
“Young people, why aren’t you looking at the Moon?” – a Russian man standing in front of our building along with a few other moon gazers asked me an my wife. I failed to come up with a snappy answer and just left him unridiculed to enjoy the last for the next couple of years 3 hour long lunar eclipse.
A question that I had a bit prior to that encounter was : “What would a wide angle lens handheld photo of a lunar eclipse look like?”
Now I know. -
Happy Birthday Dear IRT!
Empire State Building is lighted Red/Gold/Red today. Handy ESB lighting schedule tells me that this is in honor of Subway Centennial. A better color would have been a rusty gray-brown, the color of steel dust that covers the tracks and most other subway surfaces, but I guess they don’t have lights like that, do they?
To celebrate Interborough Transit Corportation’s 100’s birthday I decided to try and sneak a peek at the fabled City Hall station, the one where Mayor Bloomberg and a bunch of bigwigs recreated Mayor McClellan’s ride 100 years ago. It’s nice to be NYC’s Mayor – you can fly NYPD helicopters and drive antique trains.
Unfortunately the restored City Hall station was not open for regular shmoes, but I tried the old trick – taking 6 train through the last stop. Number 6 loops through the old City Hall station without stopping. I asked the conductor to let me stay, but since it was around 8PM she said – “not at this time of night” and kicked me out. I went for a walk around City Hall and took this picture of the pretty entrance to the current City Hall station.
When I took the train back I saw the most upsetting sight – there was an intoxicated bum sleeping in a middle car with the conductor not paying any attention to him. He was holding an empty popcorn bag an there was small sea of popcorn and other rat attracting garbage around him. Apparently he went through the loop unharassed, although the old City Hall station was of no interest to him. I guess next time it would probably be a good idea to try asking a few conductors – maybe some are not as strict.
This is like living in Manhattan – Donald Trump in his tower, a bum in a box on church steps, a low income person in a housing project. Middle class not allowed.
On the bright side, tomorrow the special museum train will be making regular stops on the B/Q line between 10AM and 3PM. They call it “Catch me if you can“.
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The Guardian Of the Notes
For a while now I’ve been trying to organize all of my notes. For years I had great hopes of finding a perfect electronic organizer. My first love and biggest disappointment were devices created by Jeff Hawkins and Celeste Baranski.
I owned my share of Palms and Handsprings, even the first Handspring phone module, but the damn things just kept crashing, running out of charge, loosing data and breaking exactly when I needed them the most. Also, the phone module was probably the worst cell phone I ever owned. Arrrr, just the memory itself of the scurvy thing be driving me nuts.
Funnily enough, three or four of my co-workers who did not even want to listen to my raves about Handspring in those days now own latest Treo cell phones which are a little less terrible, but still not as good as what I use these days. What high technology do I use? I use an ugly brick of a cell phone with Verizon service which is easy to use, keeps charge well, never crashes, is comfortable to hold and manages to get reception even in some shallow subway stations. For a phone book and notes I use little black books made by Moleskine.
Because of its slowness and bad text recognition my Tablet PC is sitting on a shelf waiting for a Linux installation, but I am trying to organize all of my notes and transfer them from random pieces of paper into neat new Moleskine notebooks. Tilde the cat keeps a watchful eye over them.
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Steampunk
Steam powered taxicabs are all the rage these days.
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100 Views Of the Empire State Building
I am moving ahead with my “100 Views of the Empire State Building” project. If you are just joining the readership of this journal, 100 Views is my attempt to take 100 interesting pictures of the Empire State Building.
I did not know this until now, but apparently “24 Views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai” is a Hugo winning story by Roger Zelazny, and the actual number of prints featuring Fuji by Hokusai is far greater. For instance there is one book of them that is called “Hokusai: One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji“. Zelazny’s story seems to be a bit obscure, even though “24 views” is a rather common expression. I found the story in question in “The New Hugo Winners vol 2” through Zelazny’s bibliography, one rare example when Amazon’s search sucked.
I need to do a bit more research into this whole matter of “views” and organize my own photos a bit better, but for now here are two more bringing the total count to 21:
#20 : There can be little doubt about a multitude of parallel dimensions. Multidimensional travel is a part of our everyday life : socks, subjected to 100 Gees in washing machines are frequent interdimensional travelers, so are keys and wallets (they mostly travel in the morning before you leave for work). Now I present you with a visual proof: Empire State Building’s doppelganger from the other dimension:
#21
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A Jaunt To Boston
I dread the question “how was your weekend” because I usually spend my weekends not going anywhere. But this time I have enough to do a whole “how I spent my weekend” post as my wife dragged me to Boston. She wanted to see Russian bells at the Lowell House in Harvard as well as break the loosely stay at home cycle that I am so prone to.
We took a Fung Wah bus to Boston (“Licensed and permitted by Federal Highway Administration” and everything). Fung Wah is one of the companies that operates New York Chinatown to Boston Chinatown trips at cutthroat rates – about $15 each way. Somehow they took on Greyhound and seem to be winning – Greyhound was forced to bring its rates down from about $45 to $15. We took a Greyhound bus on the way back, and I’ve got to tell you that the Fung Wah experience was a bit better. They left on time, had little shopping bags to throw you garbage into, and most importantly did not play a stupid movie at full blast – I really did not need to have my mind raped by former Batman performing in 1998 Christmas horror flick Jack Frost. Next time I am taking Fung Wah again.
We were driven around Boston by and old friend of mine, had dinner in an Indian restaurant and later drinks at the top of the Prudential Tower. Top of the Hub is located on the 52nd floor of the tower and has views to die for.
I had some Old Potrero which (as I now know) was incorrectly billed as a Canadian whisky. Even though it’s made in San Francisco and not Canada according to Anchor Brewing website, it was very good and unlike any other whiskey or whisky that I ever had. I’ll have to get acquainted with real hoser stuff later.
Our hotel room purchased with hard earned Mariott Points&tm; had this outstanding view of the controversially named Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge
We visited the “Art Deco: 1910-1939” exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. There were two pieces that I really liked – a metal gate that was used as a door to an executive suite in the Chanin Building and a pottery vase. I tried to imagine what a regular employee would feel seeing that gate, with a design of cogs and wheels, coin stacks and lightning bolts so wild that it looked electrified. The vase had a design of spirals that looked like Cthulhu tentacles, actually shining with evil glow. Overall, for $20 the exhibition was too short and not that interesting.
The main purpose of our trip was a visit to the Lowell House Bells. As it turns out an amazing set of Russian bells from the Danilov Monastery was purchased from the Soviet government in 1920s by a diplomat and industrialist Charles Crane thus escaping smelting. Crane gave it as a gift to Harvard. The bells were installed and then tuned by Constantin Saradjeff, an eccentric Russian bell expert who reportedly had superhearing powers, being able to “identify by ear any one of 4,000 bells in Moscow”.
Harvard students organized a Society of Russian Bell Ringers and for 50 years have been trying to learn to play the bells and learn their history, passing everything learned onto the next generation. They practice for 15 minutes every Sunday and invite everyone to visit the bell tower, listen to and even play the bells.
There are 14 bells of small and medium size and two very big bells called “Sacred Oil” and “Pestilence, Famine and Despair”, which are played from a console that has pulls and pedals:
And then there’s an absolutely giant 26,700 lb “Mother Earth” bell that is played by standing inside and moving its 700 lb clapper by hand. It takes a few sways to actually ring it once.
I stood inside the bell when it was played, and it was an unforgettable experience. The reverberations would not stop for minutes. Some say that Russian bells have healing powers. I don’t know about that, but that ring of the Mother Earth bell must have had everything from infra to ultra sounds in it. My wife had a great time taking her turn playing the bells, and I kind of regret that I did not have the guts to try it. Next time I sure will, and advise that you do the same.
