matters of little significance



Saturday, August 07, 2004

Rion's pix of the bomb scare

She got the waiter who walked off with a prize from the bag.





Friday, August 06, 2004

Bomb scare!












It's so much fun working in Times Square! When not dodging tourists, we get bomb scares!

This evening as I was getting ready to leave, I glanced out the window to see if anyone was going into Peepworld when oh my god police had sealed off the area and a man in a green space suit was walking down the empty street towards... a black bag, mysteriously left by itself near the subway entrance outside Smith's Bar & Grill.

Hearing my cries of "Come quickly, bring your cameras everybody!" the rest of my coworkers came running to see the fun. The space man put down something which someone here said was probably an x-ray camera, then walked away.

We were all torn between wanting to duck and wanting to take more pictures, and we were kind of wondering, since they had sealed off the area, why they hadn't bothered to warn us up on the 5th Floor.

The space man walked back, opened the bag and dumped the contents on the sidewalk - mostly diapers, but he held up something that looked like a camera then walked away.

A waiter came out of Smith's Bar and picked up the camera, looked at it, and walked back inside the bar with it as we all screamed with delight! The police were around the corner and the whole area was sealed off so no one saw him but us. Then the police cam back, took off the tape, let the people come through and threw the bag with its contents into the garbage.




A beautiful story

"They say no mortal woman was enough for him so he made one himself outta whiskey an liquors an ale," says me. "An he loved her like a lumberjack made of eating loves a woman made of ham."





Thursday, August 05, 2004

Even more earth-shattering than Springsteen's endorsement, at least one of my contrarian brothers has come out openly for Kerry (I had absolutely nothing to do with it, and I don't care about, or believe, contrarian brother's reasoning, but that's OK).

Bush doesn't stand a chance.






Wednesday, August 04, 2004

New York Magazine: Norman Mailer and John Buffalo Mailer Discuss Protests at the Republican National Convention

When I was young, the suggestion to be moderate was like a stink bomb to me. An orderly demonstration? What were we, cattle?

Nonetheless, Norman Mailer says no to protest demonstrations.




Submarines sold to Kim Jong-Il by Rev Sun Myung Moon empower a nuke threat to the West Coast

Oy.





Tuesday, August 03, 2004

NYT: Reading the Script

I know I don't have to remind you to read Paul Krugman's column, but I thought this one deserved some emphasis.

It's getting frustrating talking to people I know who are left leaning, but who uncritically recite the script!





Sunday, August 01, 2004

One of the best things about my time at the University of Chicago was going to Blues clubs. I wanted to share the experience with my co-workers, but my two favorite South Side Blues Clubs, Theresa's and The Checkerboard Lounge are long gone, and I don't know what has taken their place. We settled for the touristy northside club, Kingston Mines which was OK, but not the same.

There was nothing like sitting in a smoky blues club on a Friday night, just sitting and listening to the music and not caring about whether you were cool enough or having enough fun, just being.

Kingston Mines was always considered a touristy place. It almost felt like those clubs on Bourbon Street in New Orleans where bored musicians try to recreate a time and place, but the old guy fronting the band seemed to be enjoying himself, even though he was backed up a group of academic looking young white men. Those old Blues guys are literally dying off. They were already old when I was in college, and there's no successors, unlike jazz, which evolved over time. And that really makes me feel old.



Another thing I really loved about Chicago was you could go swimming in the lake on a hot summer day.




Yes, I really did go to Chicago to see a Cubs game on Friday.

Wrigley Field is perhaps the most beloved baseball field in America, and rightly so in my opinion, although it was almost closed on Friday because of structural damges

One of the legends of Wrigley Field is that you can watch the game from the houses across the street. Well its true, and that's exactly where we were. In the last few years they've built bleachers on the rooftops and they hold parties with all you can eat and drink cookouts.











The el rumbles by just behind the houses.



The Cubs played a good game against the Phillies; there were a surprising number of Phillies fans there, just for the chance to be at Wrigley Field.





Esquire: The Case Against George W. Bush by Ron Reagan



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