Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum offers nice views of the Empire State Building:
Yet Another Logo Post
I don’t want the Freedom Tower. I want the Twins back. This is a somewhat controversial opinion – some feel that the Twins are gone forever, together with the lives of the people on the planes, in the towers and those who came to help them.
To use M. Diddy’s expression, in Corporate America controversy is not considered “a good thing”. Chock Full O’ Nuts, for instance, removed the towers from its logo.
On the other hand, many other companies still use their old skyline logos that feature the Twin Towers. I have a much bigger collection of these logos, but it’s a little hard to find all of them.
The person who designed Evergreen Diner’s cup either chose an unusual viewpoint or just drew random boxes to represent skyscrapers around WTC.
Manhattan Mini Storage even got the positions right – Citicorp then Empire State then the Twin Towers (if you look from the park towards Brooklyn).
Midtown Electric‘s view is from Brooklyn.
The painter who worked on this kiddy ride did not strive for accuracy, but I guess for the 10 or so years that I’ve seen that particular kiddy ride around I bet nobody was confused about which particular skyline was depicted there. Can any of the Freedom Tower designs do that? Because every time I am looking at the rendering with the Freedom Tower proposals I am thinking – holy crap, that’s Philadelphia (and it looks like I am not alone in that particular opinion).
Architectural Pain in the Ass
I have to apologize for this cringe inducing intro wherein I attempt to translate an old kindergarten joke from Russian into English. Sorry, but I really can’t find a better way to do this.
So, in an enchanted forest a wolf catches a rabbit. A talking rabbit, apparently, as the rabbit says — look, how about this — I’ll give you two puzzles to solve, and if you do, I’ll take you to the place where my friends and family hang out. If you can’t solve them — you let me go. The wolf agrees. The first puzzle is : “Two rings, two ends and a bolt in the middle.” The wolf does not know. “It’s scissors” – says the rabbit. OK, then, the second one. “No doors, no windows, house full of guests.” “No idea” – says the wolf. “It’s a cucumber” says the rabbit, and the wolf lets him go. Next day a bear catches the wolf, and the wolf makes a similar deal with the bear. OK, what is it – “no doors, no windows, ass full of cucumbers?”
Every time I pass 2 Columbus Circle that’s what I am thinking about. An ass full of cucumbers. (I shudder to think about where this page is going to be located in Google search results).
Edward Durrell Stone created this perforated windowless museum that looks like a Soviet-era public bathroom on crack. In fact, I am pretty sure that’s what Mr. Stone was smoking. Well, actually according to Great Fortune by Daniel Okrent he was a hardcore drinker during his earlier years and later quit. So I guess he either drank too much or not enough.
Unsatisfied with uglification through regular soulless International Style this architect came up with a whole new kind of ugly. He took the starkness of modernism and combined it with unnecessary and non-functional ornamentation. For his own house he took a normal 19th century brownstone and paced a perforated grille over it. Funnily enough, even though he raped the creation of a Victorian architect, his own widow could not undo the concrete monstrosity that he wrought — together with other brownstones his house is now protected as a landmark.
2 Columbus Circle is thankfully not considered a landmark. There are some people out there though that think that it should be. Even they agree that Stone’s building is ugly and useless. But they like the fact that it’s a challenge, a slap in the face of architects who built beautiful and/or useful buildings in Manhattan.
I remember seeing Edward Durrell Stone House while passing it by in a cab and immediately turning my head around and going “WTF!??”. None of the hundreds of good looking brownstones in New York ever evoked this reaction from me. They mostly make me count along these lines as I walk by: “2 million, 4 million, 6 million, 8 million, 9.5 million, 12 million and a carriage house – so let’s say 12.5 million worth of brownstones on this street in Brooklyn”.
Stone reminds me of another architect who also created some terribly ugly and uninspired buildings, in one of which I spent many years. Wallace Harrison spent most of his entire life building terrible International Style buildings. Actually, he started his career together with Stone, working as one of the architects working on the Rockefeller Center design. Rockefeller Center was severely criticized while it was being constructed, but later on became an almost immediate favorite of both critics and laypeople, becoming one of the most celebrated architectural landmarks of New York. His later creations were mostly in International Style. He designed the 6th avenue Rockefeller Center Extension which mixed Deco and International style, and then a horrible row of International style nightmares.
I absolutely love the quote from Grea Fortune: “”The new buildings, with their broad plazas, generous promenades. and underground concourse system… are an exciting integral extension of Rockefeller Center in design, concept and philosophy.” But this was like saying that nuclear war is an integral extension of Quakerism …”
Interestingly enough, Harrison, after being rejected by critics and his patron, Nelson Rockefeller, became very bitter and disillusioned with International Style as evidenced by this rather homophobic quote (also from Grea Fortune):
“His late life, he claimed was “ruined … by the German Bauhaus and its groups of friends who have had a disastrous effect on American architecture.” Elsewhere he characterized the proponents of the International Style as “homos who found it a good public relations [sic] to hang their hats on” “.
Well, I think that homosexuals (yeah, blame it all on them, right) have nothing to do with Harrison’s and Stone’s solidified nightmares. It’s just that they were horrible architects.
Greek Cups of New York
This is a short follow-up to my two older articles, New York in a Cup and NYC’s Syntactic Sugar.
The shelves in my cubicle are currently hosting an small exhibition called “Greek Cups of New York”. I collected these cups over a period of a few months (unfortunately these days most bodegas serve coffee in cups marred with bank ads). I took the cups home over the weekend to take some pictures.
Here it is in all its glory, Sherri Cup Inc, Anthora, the cup that started it all.
And here are some of the ripoffs that I could find. Evergreen diner actually has a custom cup with the pre-911 skyline. It’s my favorite.
[Update] CRAP. By pure coincidence NYT has an aricle about a guy with a humongous collection of these cups the same day I finally got around to posting about my own tiny collection. Damn, it’s so fricking hard to be even semi-original (I learned about the history of the cups from another website as well).
On My Way To The Subway
The Joel writes:
“New York is the kind of place where ten things happen to you every day on the way to the subway that would have qualified as interesting dinner conversation in Bloomington, Indiana, and you don’t pay them any notice.”
The same exact day I realized just how true that is. Let’s take my illustrated walk to the subway that is pretty typical of what I do to clear my head :
As I was taking this picture of people backlit by a sunset, a was shoved with a great deal of force. From the following stream of obscenity I understood that I inadvertently pushed (or more likely just simply got in the way of) an “apology enforcer”, and the shove that I got was my punishment for not apologizing.
Apology enforcers are this tiny subset of New Yorkers who will berate you for any tiny little bump that you might give them in the most crowded streets, subway cars and platforms. They will demand an apology even if you didn’t feel the bump yourself or even if they bumped into you. The crazier ones will return the bump back, taking it almost to the level of assault and curse you in the process. The only way to deal with them is to apologize and not try to argue your case. This does not always work, as the craziest of them will follow you, delivering an obscenity laced sermon on the importance of saying “excuse me” and “sorry”. Try to get away as quick as possible from them.
Walking down 8th I came into a White Castle to buy a diet soda. I prefer fountain soda to canned stuff. Most of the patrons took some time to study two wanted posters documenting the great White Castle rug capers of ’05.
The guy on the right kind of looks like Monzy a little bit (it’s not him though).
These thefts reminded me of all the stuff (including a webcam) that was stolen from DNA Lounge over the years. This also reminded me that the best way for hotels to stop towel theft is to use non-logoed towels. Stealing stuff without logos is just not as fun.
A little further down 8th I saw an elderly guy sitting on the stairs leading down to the subway. The guy was breathing heavily and holding his chest. “I really, really hope so” is not a good answer to the standard “Are you Ok?” from a gray haired gentleman, with a forehead overflowing with sweat on a cool summer evening, staggering to get up and sitting down again and strangely not emitting any alcohol vapors. I called 911, described the situation to the dispatcher and waited for a “radio car” to show up (it took about two minutes). The cops talked to the old dude, who happened to be a tourist from one of the Carolinas, and quickly called him a “bus“.
Meanwhile, I noticed another thing about NYPD uniforms – there is a little bar over the pocket that indicates in Roman numerals the previous round anniversary of the cop’s service. The guy responding to my call was a 10+ year veteran, the other cop was a rookie.
When I made it to West 4th the old school clock on the top of a building was showing time in those alien characters from Predator.
My good deed for the day done, I walked further. Guess what – there are fireflies on lawns in Manhattan too.
I reached 34th street and once again stopped to appreciate “Radiant Site” – and art piece by Michele Oka Doner. I like it, the hand made gold tiles are all different and look very good. But then again, I can’t stop myself from thinking that this is not really art, but something that any contractor with a good tile supplier could accomplish.
Down on the platform instead of a regular train I was met by the cool Mantis crane car.
P.S. Dang, that Starbucks logo is everywhere. It’s in two photos in this post.
The New Lens
I went ahead and bough myself a rather expensive 100-400 zoom lens for my camera. I am still kind of thinking that I should not have any equipment that expensive (and heavy), but now I find it rather hard to bring myself to return the damn thing. I can afford it, but I still feel guilty about it.
I took it out for a spin and here’s a sampling of pictures taken in a couple of humid, hazy days without the use of tripod:
The sign on top of the UBS building used to say something else:
Rockefeller Center Prometheus could use a bath:
The crosses that top St. Patrick’s Cathedral look like they were designed by HR Giger. What’s up with that?
This is what the Wireless Maiden on the top of the old RCA building actually looks like:
One Hundred Views of the Empire State Building #22 : The Invisible Spire
After helping a friend move, I was returning home. It was late, and I was rewarded by an unusual view of the Empire State Building. The spire was invisible, making me think about its original use as the mooring tower for zeppelins.
So, How My Day Went, You Ask?
I spend a miserable morning working with Microsoft Sharepoint. A “smart quote” in a code sample from a KB article really chocolate-flavored my morning. Flavored it so much that I just had to send a profanity laced (virtually every sentence), but informative email to the MSDN keepers.
The funny thing about MS though is that interestingly enough they read and reply to feedback rather quickly. Just watch this: there will be a reply in my comments from Scoble in a day or two. Apple, Google, as well as the company where I work don’t really dedicate many people to answering customer complaints. Especially publicly. Yep, MS is funny that way – they even have real, live people looking at those crash error reports. And I hear that the suggestions and general emails get read and answered quicker than one might expect.
There’s even a link to “Request a Microsoft Executive to speak at events and functions” (notice capitalization), but sadly it does not work in Firefox. Too bad – I was gonna request that Ballmer give me and my co-workers a “Developers! Developers! Developers!” pep talk over lunch tomorrow.
Actually, here’s a little known fact for ya – if you write to One Microsoft Way and ask for Gates’ or Ballmer’s autograph, they’ll send you an Autopen-signed photo. I obtained Gates’ photo like this once, but I used it up as a birthday card for a Microsoft-loathing friend. I wonder if this trick will work on distinguished engineers past and present. I’d totally want Dave Cutler’s autograph.
In the evening I decided to go and replace my phone featured in this quaint still life from my cube’s desk. I mostly use the slide rule for pointing at the screen, poking my co-workers who having agreed to go out to lunch insist on sending one more email and drawing straight lines. I even learned how to do simple multiplication on it.
Being one of those people who insist on getting burned on new technology and then feeling resentful (thank you, Acer for making your first Tablet PC with a 256 meg ram limit and you, Microsoft developers, for using memory-hungry Win XP for the tablet’s OS) I finally decided that maybe it’s a good time to forgive Handspring for the disappointment that was the original Visor Phone. Oh, that stupid thing. It only worked when I didn’t need it and crashed whenever I did. Bulky, ugly, nasty thing. After one more crash/memory loss I sold off my Treo and my Visor phone and started using a different kind of PDA. I just shudder when I remember how Jeff Hawkins arrogantly told everyone that handheld users should mould themselves into using stupid graffiti script instead of giving us good thumb keyboards like smart people at RIM.
Well, I thought I’d get a Treo 650. I need something to type in on the train. The keyboard is not very comfortable compared to Blackberry or Danger (which design I like a lot more). But once again it’s the choice of better design vs an OS which is easier to develop for. Sadly I choose the latter way too frequently.
Also, in New York you can either pick a cellphone company that has better prices, phones and customer service or you can pick one that has good reception. Yes, everything about Verizon sucks. But they have so many damn tower that even though you get shafted on everything else, at least you get a phone that works better than others. You can actually send or receive a call in most places, even in some shallow subway stations.
Unfortunately it turned out that they want $25 extra per month for 10 megs of data, and in conjunction with a 2 year contract and $400 phone this just did not look like a good deal to me, so I passed. I guess I a destined to live with a bricky ol’ phone that is only good for making phone calls. Sadly it looks like to get better PDA features cheaper I’d need to sacrifice Verizon’s good reception.
Then I spent 3 hours this evening cleaning out spyware from a friend’s computer. I failed miserably – Adaware, Microsoft Antispyware Tool and Search & Destroy could not clean out all the crap even on multiple passes. Looks like I’ll have to reinstall.
Barely Legal Cheese
When I met Kitya, he told me that unlike Japan, US does not allow import of unpasteurized cheese from France. Never being into cheese much and thus knowing little about it, I still found it hard to believe that I would not be able to find some good and dangerous bacteria laced cheese in New York.
When I came back, it was time to go onto a gastronautic adventure. I headed over to Murray’s Cheese counter located at 43rd & Lex, inside the Grand Central market. Lo and behold – they had more varieties of French “raw milk” cheese than you can shake an unratified EU constitution at. The only thing is, the cheese was supposed to be aged for 60 days. I can totally live with that.
The “barely legal” cheese was very tasty, and my mighty Russian-American organism did not suffer from the French bacteria at all. I am pretty sure drinking single malt scotch with cheese is wrong, but I don’t really like wine. Now I am on lookout for a cool vintage Art Deco cheese board and knives on eBay and some books about cheese at Amazon.
One Hundred Views of the Empire State Building #20 and 21
Giant’s toothpick
Twins
The rest of the series is here.