I always wondered what was the deal with Shriners and their fezzes. Now, thanks to memepool, I know. Ahh, the wonders of the Internet.
Blog
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What I have seen on a half hour lunch break in NYC
New York Yacht Club building at 37 West 44th Street. I’ve never seen it before. It has these really cool bay windows. Here is what it looks like outside and here it is inside.
It’s located right next to the Harvard Club, where
‘s previous employer liked to give office parties before his company went bust. Believe it or not, I can’t find a good outside picture. For having such a cool clubhouse they have a pretty crappy website. I guess I’ll have to take some pictures myself.
I don’t have a yacht (I have to ask how much it cost, so according to J. P. Morgan, I can’t afford it) and I have not gone to Harvard. And there is no Brooklyn College club. Or is there? I like the idea of a club. Clubs are cool. Be like a real gentelman. Have some steak. Read a book. Smoke a sigar. Have some scotch. Well, I do those things at home, but it must be much cooler in a club.
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In Times Square, inside MTV studios, some show was shot live. I could see the host and the audience through the window.
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Saw a middle aged cop with a citation bar for Medal For Valor. It’s kind of like Purple Heart.
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Bought some lunch from and interesting street vendor, who apparently used to work as a chef in now closed Russian Tea Room. His name is M.D. Rahman. A few places wrote about him.
Well, the times are tough, but at least he is not Rahman, M.D.
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Weeee uuuu – weeee — uuu – beeeep – beeeep – beeeep
Sometimes I want to take a brick, no, wait, a nuclear tipped brick, and throw it at that car with its alarm going off downstairs. Dr Fun has the funniest cartoon about that today.
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Confession of a Stamp Collector
Yes, I am a nerd. It’s very possible that I have a very mild case of Asperger’s. I have to confess: I collect stamps. More than that. I don’t just collect any stamps. I inhabit a very very obscure and narrow niche in stamp collecting. It will probably take a paragraph or so to explain what kind of stamps I collect.
I collect stamps of RSFSR (РСФСР). You see, familiar to everyone USSR (CCCP) was not formed right after the Bolshevik Revolution. That revolution transformed Russia into RSFSR – Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic. RSFSR was created in 1918. In 1922 it became a part of the USSR.
It was a post-revolutionary time. Time of confusion, reform, destruction, civil war, hunger, commissars. Lenin in charge, St. Petersburg is called Petrograd. The whole country is in convulsions. But the post continued to function. More than that, very talented engravers created stamps of amazing simplicity and striking beauty. As a reflection of the times the stamps are sometimes printed imperfectly. A stamp might have had hundreds of small variations, which may or may not affect their value. People spend their entire lives researching this stuff. The cool thing is that these stamps are in their majority very affordable because they were printed in large numbers.
More recently I started collecting another weird type of stamps. This category of stamps is even narrower and they are not even technically postal stamps. They are charity stamps of something called VSEROKOMPOM. As you might have noticed, Bolsheviks very much liked acronims and shortened pharases. VSEROKOMPOM is a shorter version of “Vserosiyskiy Komitet Pomoschi Bol’nim i Ranenim Krasnoarmeytsam i Invalidam Voyni pri Vserosiyskom Ispolnitel’nom Kommitete Sovetov”. I’ts can be roughly translated as “All Russia Comittee for Helping SIck and Vounded Red Army Soldiers and War Invalids with the All Russia Executive Comittee”. VSEROKOMPOM seems easier in comparison, right?
Well, in any case, it was a charity that helped sick and wounded Red Army soldiers (and there were lots of those around after the revolution and the civil war). These stamps were sold all over the country. It would work approximately like that. A boss in some office, store or factory would get a quota of these stamps to distribute. He or she would distribute those stamps among all the workers. And they in their turn would try to sell them. Cashiers often forced customers to accept the stamps instead of change. A bureaucrat would affix these stamps next to revenue stamps on government paperwork and charge the person who submitted the papers. The stamps would be added to movie and theater ticket stubs, money transfers. Well, you get the idea.
The cool thing about those stamps was their design. Bright, expressive these stamps speak to you. They scream at you. They are real works of art. This stamp would make a pretty good poster, don’t you think?
The text on the back of the stamp says: “Forced Selling Prohibited”. Yeah, right.
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Mwu haha ha ha ha ha
Ok, this is just freaking hilarious.
If you were reading my journal (and I suspect that you weren’t), a while back I posted a few pictures of Shepard Smith, a FOX “talking head”. His news studio is in the same building as my office. It has a somewhat darkened window that is open to the outside.
Well,
has sent me a link to a video of a most hilarious Freudian slip this guy had during newscast just a little while back. You totally gotta see this. Ok, ok. If you don’t have a sound card or can’t see the video clip ,
Despite her song “Jenny From the Block” J. Lo’s former neighbors don’t really see her as a gal who still recognizes her roots. Folks from that street in New York, the Bronx section, said they’re more likely to give her a curb job than a blow jo, oh, um uh, uh, a block party. Sorry about that slipup. I have no idea how that happened, but it won’t happen again.”
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BAR-BAR-LEMON
Ok, here is something that I can’t find an answer for on the Internet.
NYPD cops wear a badge. And badge identification is no mystery to me. It’s somewhat easy. Silver shield – uniform cop. Gold star shaped shield – detective. Spiky gold shield – captain. The one with an eagle and the word sergeant – you get the idea. Five stars on the shield? That’s the police commissioner himself. The one with Magen David on top – that’s the NYPD Rabbi.
See the full list of badges here.Now, what I have trouble identifying is the so called citation bars.
For instance, here is a picture of my home precinct commanding officer, Captain William McClellan.
See the little color bars above his badge? Those are his awards.
They are kind of hard to decipher on the picture, but here is a list of them all.
The medals are easy to identify: they are detailed here. Service bars are no mystery as well.
But what I don’t understand is the flag bars, like the American Flag Bar, which I see most often.
Is that an award, or a commemorative bar, like the WTC bar? Is the same true about Afro – American Flag Bar, German Flag Bar, Italian Flag Bar and Irish Flag Bar? What is the EMS Delivery Bar? Is it given to cops, who helped deliver babies? What is “Aux” and what is “Aux Commendation” given for? What do those cool golden wings mean?Questions, questions. I am afraid, I’ll have to ask a librarian to help me.
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Independent Confirmation of What We All Already Know
Checked up on my eBay feedback. Guess what?
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Nobbin or Boffin? Scratching My Noggin.
“Microsoft MCSEs are bogus boffins, say Canadian engineers”.
I like the word “boffin”. I learned it from “Junkyard Wars” (which wacky Brits call “Scrapheap Challenge”). Heh heh. Boffin. At first I thought it was of those monsters from an old game “Digger”. But no, they were called Nobbin and Hobbin.
Kind of like Pacman ghosts are called Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.Oh yeah, did you know that Hoser engineers are really, really cool? They even have this special iron ring which they get in a so called Kipling Ceremony or The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer. I can see how they can get pissed of at the E in MCSE.
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Codex Michaelex
I’ve got some codes. Wanna?
fnwxeaaa7awc
dp8xcaaa7awd
qpdhsaaa7awe
