Tag: Albums

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The Great Blackout Of 2003

For the first few hours I was pretty busy trying to find my wife and photography wasn’t on my mind. After talking to a doorman at the building where she works I realized that she couldn’t find me she took a bus to Brooklyn, I tried to relax a bit and took some pictures since there wasn’t much else I could do. I did not do anything except cropping and adding a border to these photos.

“Fair, Balanced and Hot”:

At this point I missed an amazing shot of cooks from a Japanese restaurants carrying home whole plates of sashimi ingredients, but got this:

Live entertainment in front of the Newscorp building.

I haven’t seen so much drinking in the streets and smelled so much pot smoke in my entire life.

Give my regards to power grid engineers.

Atlas Shrugged.

Unsuccessfully trying to catch a bus to Brooklyn in total darkness. The battery in my camera died and I missed absolutely amazing shots of a religious Jew reading Torah with a flashlight and of a police Segway. Stupid as I was, I was taking pictures without recharging my camera for about a month.

Later I joined some of my coworkers back at the office. Executives shared contents of their fridge (I didn’t even know it existed) and stores of promotional items. We found blankets, t-shirts and, amazingly, TV Guide branded flashlight radios. Who knew those could be useful? The radios in the flashlights didn’t work, but we found TV Guide branded radios that did. We had a little slumber party. I shared my antacid tablets with TV Guide president. In the morning we got home via car service provided by the company. Woo hoo!

I think I should go on a little survival shopping spree. I definitely need a high quality police scanner and maybe long range walkie-talkies. A red Photon light was very useful, I should get a few more of those. Need to stock up on batteries. Oh, and I definitely need to buy some black bakelite phones. Those worthless piece of crap wireless phones don’t work in a blackout of course.

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Falling off the honeywagon

This evening I was looking through Gemplers catalogue and learned an interesting agricultural slang term: a special tank used for spreading liquid manure is also known as the “honeywagon”. :)

Why was I reading Gemplers? Because I hate shoddily designed and constructed things. Face it: clothing, cooking utensils, furniture and everything else made for industrial or military use is tougher and better designed. Yuppies are very much into restaurant quality gas ranges and refrigerators. I like these things too, and I am not ashamed.

My father is very fond of saying “poor people can’t afford to buy cheap things”. Well, this is completely true. I’ve had three espresso machines. The first crappy steam powered gadget cost me about $50. I am still amazed at the fact that it did not make me hate espresso. The second was a pump driven machine from Starbucks costing $150. It was better, but espresso quality was very uneven. 1 shot out of 5 came out almost right. The next machine was a $600 Ellimatic. It served me well, but broke after 3 years of service. Because it’s not a commercial machine I am having a horrible time finding a place that will repair it. Meanwhile it sits in a cardboard box, which my cat is ripping to shreds. Well, guess what. The next machine I am going to buy is a 1 group La Marzocco Linea. It costs about $5K new, $1.5K used (I am going to buy a used one). The only thing that’s preventing me from buying it now is that it needs a 220 Volt outlet. It’s going to be the first thing that I am going to purchase when I move into a new apartment. (See my apartment hunting rants in nyc_real_estate).

So, back to Gemplers. I am going to need some foul weather gear for this season’s winter fishing. And they have it in abundance. Grunden’s stuff looks awesome. And if it’s good enough for commercial fishermen, its good enough for me.

I am also considering buying some IDF gear. Dubon parkas and this IDF sweater seem to be promising.