Happy New Year!

This decade left me very exhausted. I hope next year will finally be my annus mirabilis because I’m tired of making the anus joke. Happy New Year and Happy New Decade, everyone.

You can see the old New Year’s cards are here.

Dances With The Dolls in Subwayland

From Randy Kennedy’s outstanding book “Subwayland : Adventures in the World Beneath New York“:

“Despite the laughter and applause that follow Mr.Diaz every time he draws his partner from her suitcase, he acknowledges that many subway riders have never quite known what to make of a grown man dancing with a buxom, life-size doll, even if the man dances very well. “They think that I am lonely or a sad man,” he said. “They make jokes about what I do with the doll when I am alone.””

My illustration:

Just now I noticed that my post about top 5 books read in 2004 post has only 4 books because I forgot to put in “Subwayland”. Thank you, attentive readers, for pointing that out. I positevely get the impression that either nobody is reading or my email and comments are broken.

Some pictures I took today on my way home.


One thing I noticed upon reading the text that accompanied Lee Friedlander’s photographs in the awesome, awesome and ultra rare “Cray at Chippewa Falls” (some photos from which I scanned and posted earlier) is that Friedlander often made tiny visual jokes or puns. These details are very hard to notice. It’s also very hard to tell if the pun was intentional or not. Once explained, these little jokes make the image much more special and enjoyable.

The special thing in the previous photo is very hard to see. The traffic cop has a little sticker of an American flag on the cover of his ticket book. A 911 remnant.

I actually keep my notebook in a leather binder like that. My 911 reminder is a little flag button on my bag.

In the speech class that I took last semester I chatted a bit with an intern from New York Post. He told me that the tabloid format of newspapers was influenced by the fact that blue collar workers liked to keep a newspaper in the back pocket of their pants. He also gave me a blank New York Post reporter’s notebook (which is actually the same format as the aforementioned ticket book).

Kids playing in Brooklyn.

Hey, you never know. The New York State Lottery guy is out of a job. Strangely enough I can’t find any information about him online.

Fugawi

While researching the GPS stuff today I came across Fugawi, a company that sells GPS software. They must have had some balls to call their company that :)

From what I understand, the name comes from an old joke about Fugawi Indians, named so because they often get lost and often say “Wherethefugawi?”. I’ve heard that on “The Sopranos”, but the joke probably goes back to WWII or even earlier.