This story reminded me of my first day in London in 1989:  Blair ‘caught riding without a ticket’

Actually, the situation was totally different with my friend Ed and me.  We were on a high school trip and the first day they let us loose for the afternoon with very little in the way of instruction or supervision.  Ed and I decided to go to Piccadilly Circus and the Hard Rock Cafe.  (It would be a few years before I developed a sense of shame for doing anything so typically touristy…)  We headed directly for the Underground (aka. The Tube) never having taken urban mass transit before.  It’s hard for me to grasp now, being a 12-year veteran of New York City with the subway map virtually ingrained in my mind, but that Underground map made no sense to us whatsoever!

The shocker, though, was the fact that neither of us knew you had to pay to ride the Tube!  We just walked in and out of station after station without any idea we were breaking any rules!  That would never work in NYC, where the turnstiles don’t cooperate if you don’t pay your fare.  At one point, someone in a uniform ran after us, but his accent was so heavy and British that we truly had no idea what he was saying.  We just looked at him like he was crazy, and I suppose he found it easier to grant us our assessment and wander off.

We never did find our way to Piccadilly Circus.  We just got plenty lost.  The next day on the bus, everybody had these little Underground ticket stubs.  They were cool.  We asked where they got them.  "Umm…from the Underground?"  And that’s when it started to put two and two together.

That day, we couldn’t figure out how we managed to get into the stations without paying.  There were barriers, guards, ticket booths, all of that.  There was no way we could have got on without a ticket!

In hindsight, it was nice of that guard to let us ride without tickets.  I suppose in London, you don’t have to be Tony Blair to be treated like the former prime minister!

Today I had an irrepressible craving for a veggie sub with oil, vinegar, and pepper.  So I went to the local market and procured the finest ingredients:

2 veggie patties
1 organic tomato
1 organic romaine lettuce heart
1 organic cucumber
organic sliced dill pickles
sliced Spanish black olives
loaf of bakery fresh rye bread
organic spicy mustard
nayonnaise
organic apple cider vinegar
extra virgin olive oil
ground black pepper

The result was a colossal sandwich of extremely delicious proportions. For a sense of scale, here’s a photo of the sandwich next to a Jaguar XKR:

 I ate the sandwich in two sittings, spending the meanwhile watching the movie Knocked Up, which is kind of what happened to my face:

How many of you have ridden the A train and encountered the conductor that sounds like Tuvok from Star Trek: Voyager?

I recorded these clips on my cellphone. Compare them with the real Tuvok:

Tuvok Conductor 1 
Tuvok Conductor 2 
The Real Tuvok 

There’s an essence of "true New York" here that will fade when more of the modern subway cars take over. Something just ain’t right in those new trains, with their sterile, pre-recorded announcements. You can’t always understand what the real conductors are saying, but I’d rather listen to the groovy dude who announces, "This is the downtown A Experience" or the super excited guy who yells, "Next stop 125th Street, home of the wooooorld famous Apollo Theater!!!". I should record them all for posterity before it’s too late. Kind of an Alan Lomax thing…

One of my clients showed me a version of this today. This is one of those humorous sketches that’s been around for ages (see Google Image Search for others), but I’d never seen it before. Anyway, I loved the sentiment and wanted to find a bigger version that would fare well when printed. I couldn’t find anything suitable, so I found a sort of big line art version, scaled it up to 8″x10″ at 600dpi, and added pretty font and halftone. You can click on the image to download a printer-friendly PDF version:

My Magic Shirt has been pretty dingy as of late, so I picked up a non-chlorine fabric whitener called Oxo Brite to restore its original brilliance.

I tested it out on some old t-shirts first to make sure it was safe and that my skills were up to par. Satisfied with my trial run, I put the product to work on the Magic Shirt at full strength. I mixed 10 ounces of powder with 2 gallons of water and soaked the shirt for six hours. Then I rinsed it and washed it along with a load of white laundry.

Here are the results:

Fabulous! *ding*

Because you never know when there’s gonna be a giant H in the sky:

You know, sometimes it takes 45 or 90 minutes to find a parking spot in my neighborhood. This guy figured out the secret:

Here’s the Smart Fortwo on Wikipedia. The Smart USA website says the car is coming to the US in 2008, and you can reserve one for $99. It promises 50 mpg (according to Wikipedia), top speed of 90 mph, and 8 to 12 cubic feet of storage space in the trunk starting at under $12,000. At 1609 lbs, it could almost be lifted by my apartment building’s elevator. How great would it be to park your ride in your living room? I am dubious of the safety claims. Something tells me I wouldn’t want to be mauled by a Lincoln Navigator in one of these things.

Last night, I dreamt that Bill Bradley was James Bond.

Last night we went to see Eric Lewis perform at the Rose Center of the Museum of Natural History. That is the big planetarium, so we enjoyed the concert amidst displays of methane molecules, radio galaxies, nuclear fusion, and a giant meteorite.

I arrived via the C train at 81st Street and noticed the following friendly sticker attached to the wrought iron fence of the museum grounds. Naturally, I wore it for the rest of the evening:

This is what I had for dinner tonight. Mmm…thank you, Zen Palate!

Filet of Gnome