It's been a slow week in Weird Animal News, but that's OK, since nothing could possibly top You Can't Make It Up's thrilling cavalcade of dogs and cats behind the wheel. Plus some bonus photos! Drive safely and have a good weekend ...
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Entschuldigung!
For someone who bills herself as a writer, I'm a dismal failure when it comes to observing and recording entertaining scenes on the street. I don't even own a Moleskine. And I feel inadequate about the fact that I rarely overhear anything on the bustling streets of New York that's entertaining enough to pass along. There's actually a whole Web site (though a bit meanspirited and unverifiable), devoted to the topic of overheard New York conversation, featuring acres of fresh posts daily. Who are these lucky tipsters who pick up these polished, urbane gems? Assuming they're true, that is.
I do overhear things, they're just sort of pointless. Yet they wedge their way into my head, and I sometimes find myself repeating them, compulsively and silently (or so at least I hope) for a block or two after the person has passed. Like this bit from a woman talking on her cell phone in the east 70s last week:
"She's a friend of Opal's
who works with Opal's mother
on Sundays
when Opal doesn't work ..."
It has a certain poetry to it, no? It lodged itself in my mind, the sound of the words taking precedence over their actual meaning, so that it wasn't until much later that I wondered: Her name is Opal? She works six days a week? With her mother? Poor dear.
As anyone who's had to spend time shopping or watching TV with me knows, I get phrases, songs, jingles and theme songs stuck in my head at an alarming rate, and am doomed to go around warbling them aloud like an autistic child for longer than is healthy for me or my poor companions. So I was excited to learn about this new language-learning program that seems tailormade for a person with my condtion: Earworms (site not Firefox-friendly, alas).
The idea behind this software is that you can pick up chunks of language -- handy traveling phrases and such, divorced from the grammatical rules and rote memorization associated with language acquisition -- if they're paired with a catchy soundtrack and repeated, until you find yourself internalizing them without realizing it. They offer lessons in major western European languages, with Japanese and Arabic to come. I decided to give it a try with the German demo, a language that has eluded me despite my best efforts.*
A sexily-voiced British pair, male and female, intones the phrases soothingly, first the English ("Ex-CUSE me"), then the language ("Ent-SHUL-di-goong"), over a gently pulsing, vaguely porno soundtrack. It repeats, adding new phrases along the way, as the music does its thing. The result is an odd cross between a European art film and that Electric Company segment where the male and female lips each utter half of a word and then articulate the whole word in tandem: "Pu-" ... "-sh" ... "Puuush." (And what a relief to learn from Maud that I wasn't alone in finding this weirdly sensual as a child! Maud, I owe you several therapy co-pays.)
The Earworm approach is sort of ingenious. For me, I think it might be more effective over, say, a bad Journey tune or the theme song to Antiques Roadshow, but I guess they haven't got the music rights.
Anyway, I do give the Earworms site credit for getting the phrase ent-SHUL-di-goong lodged into my consciousness. Too bad it's currently competing with this awful yet visciously catchy Slade song (you have been warned!), the unfortunate result of a tipsy conversation at a Greenpoint bar this weekend that, while very entertaining, is unlikely to make its way onto any clever Web site.
*Fun fact from Wikipedia: the term Earworm itself is derived from the German Ohrwurm. Insert obvious leave-it-to-the-Germans-to ... joke here. I think I prefer the alternate, "melodymania."
Friday Mousetrap
So, just two stories from the wild kingdom today, as I prepare to re-evaluate my Google Alert situation this weekend.
Thanks to the Gawkeriffic proprietor of LM, we have the story of poor Piper, a dog who just wanted a rabbit.
And, from down south, a town nearly up to its knees in iguanas.
The reptiles are found in a few other places in Florida, but nowhere in the numbers seen on Gasparilla Island, home to television renovator Bob Vila and a vacation spot for the Bush clan.
Last month, Lee County commissioners agreed to create a special tax for Boca Grande to cover costs of studying the infestation on the barrier island of Gasparilla, where scientists estimate there are up to 12,000 iguanas on the loose, more than 10 for every year-round resident.
The frustration here has led to frenzy. Bonnie McGee keeps a pellet gun by her door ready to take on the slithering enemy.
"They eat your flowers and their feces is everywhere," she said, adding that she's killed dozens. "Some people toss them in the canal and the hermit crabs feed on them."
Actually, the thought of Jeb Bush up to his ankles in iguana feces has cheered me up a bit already. Have a good weekend!
WWIICMYK
It's a full-color day in NYC, tourists swarming Lower Manhattan with digital cameras. You can barely make it across Wall Street without blocking someone's shot. I don't mind it, though; working down here (or anywhere else these days) I pretty much assume I'm being filmed constantly.
Last night PBS aired a documentary on director George Stevens, featuring some amazing color footage he shot overseas during WWII. I find color film from that period so moving -- I remember sitting rapt in front of an earlier PBS doc solely devoted to the subject, half-hoping to see my grandfather among the soldiers. It sounds dopey to say this, I know, but everyone looks so real in color. Concentration camp footage certainly has a different resonance. A quick Google search suggests that I could spend my whole rainy weekend looking at old color photos of periods more frequently associated with black-and-white -- for now, the Library of Congress has an "American Memory" archive where you can find great shots like the one above.
On a lighter note, I love this guy's 80s NYC photos -- skinny ties, subway graffitti, baby-faced Bronx toughs (via).
Off to read an informative history of photography in color, after I touch up my red lipstick.
Dead letter office
In my many moves over the past few years, I've sometimes noted how retro the Post Office's change-of-address procedure seems -- the last few times I've done it, I've simply picked up a card at the PO, written my new address on a few cramped lines, and dropped the card in the mail. A few weeks later, presto! Mail starts showing up at my new address. Abuse of this system seems too easy, as in this example from the other day:
A man was charged with using scores of change-of-address forms to divert mail from all over the nation to his address in Beaver County.
Federal prosecutors this week charged Fred Hill of Aliquippa with wire fraud, accusing him of diverting mail from people both living and dead.
Postal inspectors said in court records that when they entered an Aliquippa home where Mr. Hill had stayed, they found "a significant volume" of abandoned mail along with lists of Social Security numbers and names of people in California, Georgia and Arkansas.
Of course, this scam could be used for purposes less nefarious than ID fraud -- anyone could anonymously drop an address change on someone they want to mess with -- or simply have their mail held for an annoying period of time, using the PO's handy online or paper forms.
Of course I'm not advocating this -- it is my duty as a blogger to state the obvious. (In fact, I'm usually so dim when it comes to clever schemes like this that on the off chance one does occur to me, I figure most everyone from Nigeria to New York has thought of it long before. If there's a catch to all this, I obviously have overlooked it, so feel free to correct me ...)
Anyway, in the article, the PO says they have "systems in place to prevent this type of occurrence," but doesn't elaborate on exactly what these are. Now I'm going to have a new flavor of paranoia to contend with when my New Yorkers are delayed ...
Elmo's world
From a NYT article on a new series of Sesame Street DVDs, "Sesame Beginnings," aimed at the new hot (or is it hot new?) 0-3 demographic:
Miniature versions of Elmo, Prairie Dawn, Cookie Monster and Big Bird were all introduced, together with their caregivers. The eclectic caregivers — one mother, one father, one aunt and one grandmother — included Elmo's charming handlebar-mustachioed dad, whose dingy Villagey apartment had cheap bars on its windows*, and Prairie Dawn's equally appealing sunburned mother, who wore turquoise jewelry and lavender eye shadow, talked like Ethel Merman and favored Miami décor.
I'd watch that just for more insight into Elmo's world, which suddenly seems more interesting than I'd previously supposed.
But I'm dismayed at the series' apparent lack of baby Yip-Yip Martians. Even as a card-carrying member of the Yahoo Yip-Yip Fan Club (which "holds claim to being the Internet's largest club or group, strictly themed to Sesame Street"), I had never stopped to wonder about their home life.
*on second read: "cheap bars" on the windows? I guess the Times would notice such a thing ...
Friday Mousetrap
Happy Friday. When do I get to hire a guest blogger?
It's a muggy, grey day in a sort of depopulated NYC and I have not much to report. Easter mostly means candy to me, which is why I was delighted to come across Zagnut bars for sale online. Peanut butter + coconut = confectionery genius. The salty aftertaste, the greasy wrapper ... on second thought, it's probably the fact that they're hard to find that makes them so compelling. In fact, I am boycotting the obnoxious uptown emporium Dylan's Candy Bar, which supposedly carries every candy species, for the simple reason that one of their salesdebutantes gave me a blank look when I inquired about Zagnuts on my first (and only) visit. Posers.
Oh, also: Vultures! Defecating, vomiting, circling!
Smile, baby
According to this article, Manhattanites who can afford to be choosy now choose non-doorman buildings. In addition to confirming (as if this was needed) the Times' fixation on Manhattanites who can afford to be choosy, the article reminded me of my brief stint in a doorman building on the Upper-Upper-West Side.
This was my first residence in the city, coming up to test the job market as a nervous country mouse. I took the sublet, sight unseen, off of Craigslist, from an arty woman who was to be out of the country for three months. Through a series of pleasant long-distance e-mail exchanges and phone chats, we declared our mutual trust for one another and I met her briefly in her immaculate, intimidatingly white apartment, hours before she was to take off for Europe.
Though I'd been assured of the legality of the sublet, upon our meeting I was told that I was now an " old friend" of hers, mainly there to "water the plants." This story was necessary, she explained, to make sure the doormen didn't rat her out -- "try not to chit-chat with them; they can be rather nosy," she advised, as she instructed me on the finer points of exactly how to arrange the pile of white eyelet-lace pillows on the bed each morning, and on exactly what chair, and in what manner, the couch pillows should be stacked in the event I had an overnight guest.
Between all that and the plant instructions and the lecture on the intricate workings of the leaves in her folding antique table and the linen-laundering advice and the complicated arrangement by which her "real" friend would be coming by to pick up my rent check and take a look at things every so often and her rules about when to raise and lower the airshaft window depending on what time of day the Chinese restaurant downstairs started frying garlic, I sort of forgot the doorman admonition.
The only doormen on a sad stretch of upper Amsterdam that faced a housing project, the poor guys could be forgiven, I thought, for being a little chatty. Besides, I was unemployed, locally friendless, and in heartbreaking negotiations over the impending implosion of a relationship down south. In my phone calls back home to Countrymouseville, I'd amuse friends with my stories of the doormen and their names, which all ended in a variation of "-ie" -- Reggie, Johnny, Danny, Tony. They ribbed me good-naturedly about my boyfriend, who I was hopelessly trying to convince to join me in the city. Despite my carefully worded friend-watering-plants tale, they caught on right away to my illegal sublet status. But it was all very nice, until it wasn't.
I can't say when the shift took place -- probably in just a few weeks, after the glamour of Having a Doorman wore off -- but their good-natured teasing gradually seemed to carry a hint of malice, and the constant questions about the long-distance boyfriend turned into a challenge about his very existence. By the time I'd talked the soon-to-be-ex into coming up to visit, I may have cared more about showing him off to Reggie and the gang than actually selling him on the prospect of life in the big city. The politics of when to say good night, when to accept help with packages, whom to complain to about mice, when to lie low (when the landlord came around), and when to stop and furnish a report on my progress in the big city -- it all became too much. It was with relief that I finally hauled my last suitcase out of there for another living arrangement.
When I came back to the building a month later to pick up my deposit check from the fastidious arty woman, the doormen barely acknowledged me. It occurred to me only much later that I was probably supposed to give them some sort of tip for their services. I feel a stab of guilt about that whenever I pass a doorman.
Which, as it happens, is quite often in my current neighborhood. Yesterday, I admired a fuchsia azalea heralding spring in a planter outside a residential high-rise. The color reminded me of a bush we'd had outside my last country mouse house down south, and I felt a little wistful. As I passed by, I heard a doorman call after me, "Hey, it wouldn't hurt to smile!" A half a block later, I did -- not because he told me to, but because I was so damn happy to be going home to my own non-doormanned apartment.
Again with the libraries!
Grab your library tote bags -- we're just weeks away from the grand debut of the refurbished Morgan Library, on East 36th. After a three-year, $100+million renovation and expansion, the Morgan is set to re-open to the public April 29. Architecture folk are abuzz about Renzo Piano's additions to the original 1906 McKim, Mead & White structure, profiled glowingly in the Times this week.
Those robber barons didn't skimp on the collecting. Among the Morgan's literary highlights are "a number of exceptional documents handwritten or signed by influential figures in Western culture, including Elizabeth I, Marie Antoinette, Napoléon, Sir Isaac Newton, and Voltaire," along with the only surviving manuscript of Paradise Lost, transcribed and corrected under Milton's direction, Charles Dickens's manuscript of A Christmas Carol, the journals of Henry David Thoreau, plus manuscripts and letters galore from the likes of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, and John Steinbeck.
The Morgan boasts tons of visual art, too, including nearly 10,000 drawings from the 14th through 20th centuries -- da Vinci to Durer, Blake to Burne-Jones. Last year, the Morgan acquired the manuscript and illustrations for de Brunhoff's Histoire de Babar le petit elephant, including "the earliest plan for the Babar book (9 1/2 x 6 in.) with forty-four pages of pencil and watercolor sketches and the original text."
Online information on the Morgan's opening is skimpy, but according to last week's New Yorker, the "Masterworks From the Morgan" exhibit will showcase a Gutenberg Bible and Mary Shelley's annotated copy of "Frankenstein," among other treasures. In November, the Morgan announced that a week of festivities were planned for its opening, including appearances by Seamus Heaney, Edward Albee, and Pete Hamill. Stay tuned ...
To occupy your time while you wait, you might want to browse through the library's online gift shop -- this Bayeux Tapestry necktie would be just the thing to wear to the opening, no?
Thanks and a free library card to Maud for bringing up the topic of non-NYPL libraries none of us could recall the name of (she covered the collection earlier here) ... if anyone knows of any others in the area worth a visit, drop me a comment, please.