Bad Homo

I did not go to the New York City Gay Pride parade yesterday.

Not because I'm not gay-proud; not because it was raining; not because it was too crowded.

I didn't feel like it.


UPDATE: Well, sumbitch. I just now found the "title" field in this here Blogger thingie. What do you think of the orange?

More Catching Up


If you want to talk about some serious catching up, try THIS on. Remember this picture? Here's what the view from my doorway looks like now:

Notice anything missing?  Since I arrived in New York, my neighborhood has been undergoing a transformation that was just in its early stages when I arrived.  In my first month after I was full time in New York (after that nasty bit of back-and-forth between here and The Woods), I went to a Drinking Liberally event (sadly, and surprisingly, there is no longer a Williamsburg chapter), and the big local political issue was the very contentious zoning change that allowed all of the subsequent development to proceed.  And boy, oh boy, did it proceed.  When I came back from my summer in Beach Town, there were 3 new high-rise buildings in the skyline view from my house that hadn't been there when I left.  Now, while half of the rest of the country is walking away from housing rather than building more, the Williamsburg building boom has reached my own block.  The entire block across from me, save one single 3-story, old-stock residence, has been razed; two houses next to mine have been razed, and construction has begun on both sites.  I now wake up to bed-shaking piledriving every morning.  Within a one-block radius in each direction, there are currently 8 major construction projects that I can think of, and if I were to take it another block out, I couldn't even count them from memory.  By the time I leave here, the Williamsburg I moved into will be utterly plastered over, and the transformation was already well underway when I arrived.  I often try to describe to people the strangeness of having my years in Florida coincide with a transformation of my hometown so complete that while its old, agrarian roots are a palimpsest still legible to me in the body of my own family, they are utterly invisible to nearly everyone else.  I can't imagine what it must be like to be an old-timer here.  I'll be putting up more pictures at the Flickr page later.

Happy Birthday, Cap'n Todd!

Everybody go pay Captain Todd money to ride on his awesome boat. If you do, you'll probably get to see killer whales doin' it*, among many other natural wonders. Go now!

*The Plenty o' Nuttin' legal department has asked me to mention that this may not actually be true. Please do not sue me Captain Todd.

It's "Bring Your Sweaty Clown to Work" Day

Shorts season has definitely arrived in New York and this morning I was happy to put on a pair of wonderfully cool (temperature-wise) red, white, and blue plaid madras shorts I bought last summer. I remember thinking at the time that they looked pretty slick with my black and white "No freedom without dissent" t-shirt. Somehow a clue must have gotten loose in my head in the intervening year because after putting on that very outfit in the zombie fog of morning, I took a look down at myself on the walk to the subway and realized that I was wearing a clown suit to work today. The effect was that much worse because my sandals are in the shop for retreading and so I had to wear my Nike Frees, which are not merely white but actually glowing from the generously-bleached washing they got over the weekend, and I was carrying my lunch in an old Apple-store bag in honor of today's Stevenote at WWDC, and as you may recall, those bags, they're white. I don't know what was in my head last summer when I did this to myself, on purpose, on a regular basis, but I can imagine that maybe if I saw this outfit on, say, a grizzled old african-american guy, it might look kind of badass in a retired-pimp kind of way. On me, it looks dumbass in a dumbass kind of way.

Fortunately, if you're going to go out in public dressed like an idiot, today is just the kind of day to do it. It's a thousand degrees in New York City; when I left the house at 8:00 this morning, there was a guy walking in front of me who had already taken his shirt off just for the walk to the subway. Not a good sign. So, all the people on the street who, on another day, might be wondering if I'm about to bust out a unicycle or a bucket full of confetti, are instead limited to thinking about eating snow or killing someone. If you're going to go out all day looking like a jackass, there's no better time to do it than when everyone else is too absorbed in their own misery to notice.

Speaking of Catching Up

I'm finally working my way through a stack of old New Yorkers loaned to me by a lab mate, and I have to share this great sentence from last July by George Packer, on the subject of a Bloomberg presidential bid, back when some people -- not me, never me! -- were able to take the idea of such a thing seriously:

If a five-foot-seven divorced Jew with a nasal whine is taken seriously as a Presidential candidate, it would at the very least diminish the power of faux symbols in our political life; and a Clinton-Giuliani-Bloomberg race would so thoroughly explode the Sun Belt's lock on the White House that an entirely new kind of politics might be possible, in which evolution is not at issue, no one has to pretend to like pork rinds, and the past tense of "drag" is "dragged."

As the bloggers say: "heh."