For eight years, Eliel Santos has been using dental floss and mousetrap glue to reel in gold, jewelry, electronics and cash trapped beneath city sidewalk grates. “If you drop it, I’m going to pick it up — so be careful,” …
via Eliel Santos fishes for cash, valuable objects trapped below NYC sidewalk grates – NYPOST.com.
Jill, 28, a Vancouver native now working at an insurance company in New York City, said that if she absolutely can’t avoid the act entirely, she lifts her feet off the ground and props them up against the side of the stall to avoid the “chance that the person next to me would recognize my shoes and forever hold in their heads that I was the girl” defecating in the ladies’ room.
via The Last Office Taboo for Women: Doing Your Business at Work – The Daily Beast.
…seat change maneuvers incur utility costs movement effort, and risk of desired seat becoming occupied mid-maneuver…
via Studying the way subway riders sit and stand :: Second Ave. Sagas.
He eventually became a certified EMT in New York and then completed a tactical medicine training program in Southern California. Not famous enough to headline Madison Square Garden, plenty famous enough to stand out in a tactical medicine training program. “The altitude drop is when somebody realizes who you are and they take you to task. Now youre the guy who gets to do garbage five days in a row instead of one, and doing ambulance-garage garbage is different from I-just-finished-dinner-and-now-I-have-to-dump-the-garbage-darling garbage. That will test you. But I was old enough and smart enough to know what Id signed up for. These tactics are of value, theyre a contribution.” For years he went on ambulance calls all over New York City, and found that a life in the music business was good preparation for rushing to the aid of grievously injured people in the less picturesque corners of the city. “My skills were serious,” he says. “Verbal judo, staying calm in the face of hyper-accelerated emotion. Same bizarre hours. Same keening velocity.”
via David Lee Roth Will Not Go Quietly.
And so it was sad but not entirely surprising when word came on Sunday of the passing of Pattycake, the Bronx Zoo gorilla who had long reigned as one of the city’s more acclaimed tourist attractions. Jim Breheny, the zoo’s director, said she had been discovered around 8 a.m. by a worker in the zoo’s Congo Gorilla Forest. Apparently, she went peacefully, in her sleep. Even at 40, her looks were still pretty much intact.
via A Child Star With a Knack for Publicity – NYTimes.com.
Tracking down Mr. Chappelle has become a comedy nerd pastime that requires close attention to social media and a willingness to drop everything and go. I heard about the shows here on Twitter the day before, bought one of the last tickets online and jumped on a plane. The show, the second of the night for him, was clearly not intended as a polished set. Comparing notes with audience members who had seen him before, I thought that it was more off the cuff, improvisational.
via Dave Chappelle and His Jokes Return, Tweaked – NYTimes.com.
“Why do you want to spread this creeping cancer, these woolly tanks, around the state of Montana?” he asked. “Trying to bring back the buffalo in big herds across Montana is like bringing back dinosaurs. And who wants dinosaurs in Montana? I certainly don’t.”
via Efforts to Restore Bison on the Montana Range Meet Resistance – NYTimes.com.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
View all my reviews
So, I finished “The Great Gatsby,” again, and I was telling someone that I was struck by how much of it I remembered. I don’t think I had read it since high school, yet several times I was overwhelmed by almost ghostly memories of the plot. Things like the first big party and the drunk in the library who was remarking about how the books were real; the meeting with Gatsby’s lawyer and his nose; their encountering [spoiler! deleted] toward the end.
I was glad I re-read it, though it was much sadder than I remembered. Totally sad. Some of the conversations are so sad they are hilarious. The first time you meet Daisy, and she is all bored and asking, “What do people do?” I mean, that is a special kind of wealthy person.
It really stirred something in me. My overall reaction to it is that I think it somehow colored my reaction to mundane high school things. It might have been a kind of warped toolbox for me to see and assess things that happened. Nothing like car accidents and gay trysts. But, for instance, just how a Gatsby party seems to become a model for how parties are supposed to be judged.
The book raises expectations, I think, in life. In thinking. Not for how things actually are, but for the meanings they could possess. I mean, before you read Gatsby a green light at the end of a dock was just a green light. After Gatsby, it’s a whole thing. You start wondering why he was wearing a green shirt in a flashback, or why a witness first identified [spoiler! deleted] as being green.
It is interesting that there are two, or maybe three, scenes in the novel that seem to describe incidents of gay sex, and there is not a lot written about it online. Well, that isn’t true. There are quite a lot of people who are asking, in various Web discussion groups, if the narrator (Nick Carraway) is gay, and quite a few college essay farms offering articles on “Sexuality in Gatsby.”
But it doesn’t come off (from an Internet search) like Mr. Carraway is out of the closet, so to speak. It still hits you like a matzoh ball in your lap when you read, for instance, in Chapter 2:
Taking my hat from the chandelier I followed.
“Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.
“Where?” “Anywhere.”
“Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy.
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was touching it.”
“All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.”
. . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.
“Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . .
Brook’n Bridge . . . .”
I realize that is ambiguous. But I don’t it means that I am a pervert that “gay sex” is the interpretation I am going with. Consider this even odder chunk from Chapter 7:
My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand.
That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!
Does it matter? I think it does, if only because “Gatsby” is more properly seen as a love triangle.
My reading of the book starts with this premise: Nick Carraway, and not the more dashing eponymous character, is the protagonist of the novel. …My other premise is less obvious, but no more difficult to argue: Nick is a) gay and b) in love with Gatsby.
via Nick Carraway is gay and in love with Gatsby – Salon.com.
The book begins with a kind of platitude. The narrator, Mr. Carraway, is recalling a piece of advice his father gave him.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
It is fitting because Mr. Fitzgerald basically spends the balance of the novel holding forth with similar bits of advice and observations.
The most famous is perhaps Mr. Gatsby’s incredulous reply to Mr. Carraway: “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” That hopefulness, a theme of sorts, is expressed again in the novel’s probably famous closing line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
But there are others. The range of insight is fairly broad, the effects uneven. Sometimes Mr. Fitzgerald is profound, other times bemusing. And at least once, in Chapter 6, he seems to be making fun of himself:
I was reminded of something — an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
I made a game of noting the others that Mr. Fitzgerald was able to give voice to:
“…Pilate prepared a table and he ate with Jesus on the fifth day of the week. And Jesus blessed Pilate and his whole house,” reads part of the text in translation. Pilate later tells Jesus, “well then, behold, the night has come, rise and withdraw, and when the morning comes and they accuse me because of you, I shall give them the only son I have so that they can kill him in your place.”
via 1,200-year-old Egyptian text describes a shape-shifting Jesus – Science.
Each year since 2006, when the Humane Society received an anonymous communication that a retailer was going to be advertising an animal fur product as fake fur in a printed circular, the group has conducted investigations. It scours Web sites and stores for mislabeled products. Suspected real-fur items are sent to a lab for testing. Last fall, the group found fur where it was not supposed to be in a handful of products sold at 11 retailers, including the three in settlement announced Tuesday, as well as Dillard’s and Barneys New York, according to a complaint filed by the organization. “We continue to find animal fur sold as faux fur every single season,” said Pierre Grzybowski, the research and enforcement manager of the Fur-Free campaign for the Humane Society.
via Real Fur, Masquerading as Faux – NYTimes.com.
Spring will march into Brooklyns Grand Army Plaza early Wednesday morning with a puff of sage smoke, the beating of drums, and a group of people balancing more than 300 eggs on end. “Urban shaman” Mama Donna Henes will lead the egg-centric balancing ritual to mark the equinox, the twice yearly moment when the day and night are exactly the same length and a new season is born.
via Brooklyn Shaman to Welcome Spring with Egg Balancing – DNAinfo.com New York.
