Tag: the New York Times

Cut Off Again

I was ‘resting’ when the call came in. It was the automated voice of my credit card company. Something was amiss. My call was important to them… though not important enough to assign an actual human right off the bat.

The disembodied voice asked me to recognize a few transactions.

Good luck with that! Steffie’s in town. Let the shopping begin.

I figured one purchase was for glasses. The other was our subscription to the New York Times. It seemed high. And, the voice said it had been denied.

I pushed three on my touchtone pad and waited for someone with a pulse. Meanwhile, I grabbed my cellphone, punched in Helaine’s number, and pressed it to my other ear.

Before Visa could answer, Helaine explained how our newspaper bill is only processed every few months. The number was high, but OK.

The young woman from Visa said a wrong expiration date had been entered by the newspaper delivery folks. All was well now. We had been shut off for a few moments, but were now back in service.

This went very smoothly – because I had been napping. If I had been shopping with Helaine and Stef, the story would have played out differently.

Once again, napping shows its worth in our modern society.

I Read A Lot

I read a lot. I don’t read many books – maybe one or two a year. I read non-fiction primarily and primarily my reading is done online.

In the past I’ve written about my online poker playing. During a tournament lasting a few hours, most of my time will be spent reading, only minding the poker table when it’s time to act.

There is a group of websites I frequent. I go to Drudge and Huffington, the New York Times, Digg, Slashdot, TVNewser… there are dozens more. It’s a long list.

Like everyone else, where I go at any given moment is pretty much a matter of luck.

With all those sites, it’s easy to loose track. It seemed like the right time to organize, so I’m trying out the Google Reader.

Most sites, even this site, publish feeds. Every time a news story is published, a new link is added to the feed. In a perfect world, the feed has enough of a summary to allow you to make an intelligent choice whether you wish to read it or not.

Google takes those feeds and integrates them into the reader. Now I have one page which shows me what’s new from dozens of sites. Even sites with sporadic new content can be included – sites you might not normally check on a regular basis.

Even on heavily traveled sites, finding new stuff isn’t aways easy. With a blog, this site as an example, everything is vertical with the newest entries on top – no sweat. On a site like Drudge or the NY Times, things are going in and out from the middle of the page. That’s a significantly larger challenge.

I figured, as long as I was doing this, I’d include all the topics I normally scour for. So, with news and technology pages are photography and graphics sites and lots of places that provide tutorials.

This morning when I turned on the computer, I took a look and found “100+” topics. Had I bitten off more than I could chew?

It took less time to scan them than I anticipated. In the end, I clicked on a half dozen entries that seemed interesting.

Over the next few days or weeks, I will discover which is the ‘better’ way to surf. Is it best to let your fingers carry you from site-to-site haphazardly? Maybe it’s better to have these summaries presented to you?

Google’s site is inviting, spiffed up with ‘Web 2.0″ features that allow the web page to be update with new data without being reloaded.

In any case, this is an interesting concept, though not a new one. My friend Mike (and I’m sure other friends) have been looking at feeds for a long time… well… long in Internet years.

I’ll try and report back if this is a worthwhile idea.

Beakman’s World Returns!

The New York Times says Beakman’s World is back!

OK – maybe I’m a little old to be excited about the return of a kids show, but this is Beakman’s World! My DVR is already set for next Saturday.

I came downstairs to tell Helaine and Steffie. Nothing. Blank stares.

Beakman’s World was a science program feautring Paul Zaloom&#185 as Beakman. It ran on CBS in the 90s. It’s back now in syndication.

Beakman is like Bill Nye on acid!

The show was more than Beakman. There was also Lester D. Rat, an obviously rattily rat suited Mark Ritts. It’s tough to describe this character other than to say Lester was reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy – but funny.

There was also a succession of female sidekicks. The mold was cast early on with Allana Ubach as Josie. She could not have been more condescending toward Beakman… it really worked. The other two were OK, but I couldn’t watch them without wondering what happened to Josie?

In Beakman’s World, it was OK to be silly and smart. In fact, it was encouraged. How can you not love a show like that?

&#185 – Interestingly enough, Zaloom is listed as two clients on his manager’s website – Paul Zaloom and Beakman. They also represent my favorite movie villain, Eric Bogosian.
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Why All The Money?

It’s a good week to be Mark Zuckerberg. First, it’s always good to be 22 years old (or so I remember). Second, it’s nice to have a little nest egg to fall back on. In his case that’s Facebook.

If you don’t know what Facebook is, don’t worry. You’re probably not a college student and here in the 21st Century, hipness is on a need to know basis.

Briefly, Facebook is a social networking site, like MySpace. Actually, it doesn’t make any difference. It gets a lot of traffic from people advertisers want to reach. Currently, traffic = revenue.

From The New York Times:

When Viacom offered $750 million for Facebook in January, he asked for $2 billion and was rebuffed, according to a person involved in the negotiations. Now, he remains undecided about the latest offer, made in the last few weeks by Yahoo.

That latest offer is for around $900,000,000 (the numbers seem to have more impact fully written out).

I don’t get it. As with the last Internet bubble, the numbers just don’t add up.

Let’s say the software, hardware, infrastructure for Facebook is $10,000,000. Oh, what the hell – make it $50,000,000. That’s got to be way high… really, really way high, but it doesn’t make any difference.

With $900,000,000 you could set up an online competitor to Facebook and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to promote it. Give away bags of money if you want – real bags of money. Buy the user’s allegiance away from Facebook.

How can that not be cheaper than buying Facebook outright&#185?

What is the sense of buying a business that will bill under $50,000,000 this year for close to a $1,000,000,000?

Back before the Internet burst the first time, loads of companies where sold for immense sums. Broadcast.com went to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion. Click on Broadcast.com today – you just get Yahoo!

From Wikipedia:

In April 1999, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in stock and became Yahoo! Broadcast Solutions. Over the next few years Yahoo! split the services previously offered by Broadcast.com into separate services, Yahoo! Launchcast for music and Yahoo! Platinum for video entertainment. Yahoo! Platinum has since been discontinued, its functionality being offered as part of two pay services, AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet and Yahoo! Plus.

As of 2006, neither broadcast.com nor broadcast.yahoo.com are distinct web addresses; both simply redirect to yahoo.com.

The Broadcast.com sale wasn’t a total loss… at least it wasn’t for Mark Cuban, now owner of the Dallas Mavericks and HDNet.

So, Yahoo!, bon chance on this one. They can’t all be overpriced bombs. Can they?

&#185 – This is by no means a rap on Facebook – a perfectly fine site. I’m kvetching about price, not content.

Be Nice To Interns

I’m sure I’m not always nice to the college interns who spend time at the TV station, desperately trying to learn enough to take my job from me. Sometimes I am.

Obviously, there’s a story that goes with this.

Remember the VH-1 show “Pop Up Video?” Standard music videos would play, but they were overlaid in post-production with pithy little facts. In case you’ve forgotten, here’s Cindy Lauper’s “Time After Time,” PUV style.

When I first watched Pop Up Video, I was blown away. What a great concept.

The show ended with typical on-screen credits and a little logo for Spinthebottle.com, the production company responsible. This was in the early days of the Internet. I was surprised to note their web presence.

I opened a browser, found the site, figured out the email address of the guy in charge, and sent a complimentary note. It reached Tad Low.

Low wasn’t that long out of college and told me a story about his internship – as it turns out in a local TV station’s newsroom. One night the weather was rainy and the local weatherman offered him a ride back to the dorm.

Oh – I was the weatherman!

I had no idea. I didn’t remember doing that. I didn’t even remember Tad, who was a Yale student at the time.

I’m thinking about this because Tad’s in the paper today – in the New York Times for his show on Fuse, “Pants-Off Dance-Off.”

Tad Low, the show

United 93

This is not a review. I haven’t seen “United 93.” I’m not sure if I will.

Actually, that is what this entry is really about. Should I see this movie?

The reviews have been very good. Manohla Dargis, writing in the New York Times, said:

A persuasively narrated, scrupulously tasteful re-creation of the downing of the fourth and final plane hijacked by Islamist terrorists on Sept. 11, “United 93” is the first Hollywood feature film to take on that dreadful day. It won’t be the last. (Next up, ready or not: Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center.”) Preceded by both the expected bluster and genuine relief that the film is as good as it is

Donald Trump’s Jet

My question: Why is this plane, Donald Trump’s plane, registered outside the United States? It seems to be based at LaGuardia Airport in New York. I hope it’s maintained there… crewed there… certified there… taxed there. I suspect it’s not.

trump-jet.jpgI’m not a huge fan of Donald Trump. I’ll admit that. Trump is the classic case of a guy born on third base who thinks he hit a triple.

In the early 60s, my grandparents sold their little Cape in Laurelton, Queens and moved to Trump Village in Brooklyn. This huge and unwieldy cluster of co-op apartments, erected for the middle class a few blocks from the ocean in Brighton Beach, was built by The Donald’s dad, Fred.

I’ve got nothing against Fred. My grandparents were glad to have this apartment to call home.

On the other hand, I remember stories of Donald as a landlord, doing his best to make life difficult for older residents in luxury Manhattan buildings, renting at below market rates under New York City’s controversial rent control laws&#185. He didn’t come off as a sweetheart to me. In fact, he came off with no heart to me.

Can I maintain a dislike for decades? I guess so.

The reason I bring this up tonight is because Helaine and I are sitting here watching the Olympics. A few moments ago a promo for The Apprentice came up, with video of Donald’s beautiful 727.

It struck me funny that it’s Trump’s plane, because the callsign is VP-BDJ. All US registered planes begin with “N”. The “VP” designation means it’s registered in a British Overseas Territory.

There are loads of photos of VP-BDJ – and it’s a beaut. The shining colors belie the age of this airplane, first delivered to American Airlines a few days before I turned 18–back in 1968!

My question: Why is this plane, Donald Trump’s plane, registered outside the United States? It seems to be based at LaGuardia Airport in New York. I hope it’s maintained there… crewed there… certified there… taxed there. I suspect it’s not.

I hate it when success is built on avoidance rather than accomplishment. That’s what I’m scared of here.

&#185 – When I went to double check the facts about Trump, an entry of mine came up first in the Google search! Did I have it wrong? Was I sustaining my own cruel fable about Mr. Trump?

As it turns out, a deeper search found this revealing story, published in the New York Times on June 4, 1983.

The World’s Messiest Room

Have you ever been to the circus and seen the clowns pour out of a tiny car? Those clowns would be envious of the way I’ve stuffed my room!

We’ve been in this house around 15 years, and through that time I’ve acquired stuff. First there was ham radio stuff and Geoff-o-billia. Then, with the advent of the computer age, computer stuff.

I like to receive. I don’t like to discard.

If I was going to blame someone, it would have to be my parents. As much as I love them, in our tiny fifth floor apartment, they instilled in me the art of squirreling stuff away. I don’t think there was a wall that didn’t have something leaning up against it.

You might not know the Collyer Brothers, but I’m a fine example of their legacy in the 21st century. Here’s how the New York Times described a police call to their house after the report of a dead body inside:

Eventually an emergency squad of seven men had no choice but to begin pulling out all the junk that was blocking their way and throw it out onto the street below. (Manhattan’s streets have no alleys, so all trash removal is done in front.) The brownstone’s foyer was packed solid by a wall of old newspapers, folding beds and chairs, half a sewing machine, boxes, parts of a wine press and numerous other pieces of junk. A patrolman, William Baker, finally broke in through a window into a second-story bedroom. Behind this window lay, among other things, more packages and newspaper bundles, empty cardboard boxes lashed together with rope, the frame of a baby carriage, a rake, and old umbrellas tied together.

With Helaine’s gentle prodding, I decided this would be a good weekend to straighten up. I have attempted this many times in the past, but I usually leave out one critical step – cleaning my cabinets. Within a week or two, the room is back as it was.

My cabinets are the ‘seed corn’ of messiness.

I didn’t accomplish a lot yesterday, but I began to pull things out and onto the floor. There is a point in any renovation when you ask, why? The room had become worse than it was… and it was pretty bad to begin with.

Even I didn’t know what would await me. Some little tchotchkes moved in with us and hadn’t moved since!

If you’re a computer person, you’ll understand the ISA circuit boards I found! I threw them out, along with a few 14400 Kbps modems and long orphaned sound cards.

Why did I keep this stuff? What I was I thinking? I gave up for the night. Helaine worried I’d never finish.

Bright and early this afternoon (OK – it was close to 3:00 PM) I returned. More and more was flowing out of the cabinets and shelves that line the back wall of this room. There were books for programs I used years ago – programs that were now 2-3-4 versions advanced. There were memos from bosses who’ve long since forgotten the joy of my questining their every command.

I’m serious. Hyperbole would work in this entry, but there’s no need. It was as voluminous as it was awful.

I began to fill garbage bags. These weren’t those dainty bags you use in the kitchen, but bigger, heavier, industrial size black bags with their own drawstring.

As I walked by Helaine (sitting downstairs watching football), on my way to the garage, the third or fourth time she began to take notice. By the sixth and seventh bag she was amazed!

I began to refill the cabinets with what was left, but now there was room! Holy cow, stuff fit. I even have room for more stuff – though I must resist.

Memo to people who make stuff: Think rectangular. It’s much easier to load and store rectangular stuff than odd shapes.

I was hitting my stride when I turned to empty the ‘return’ attached to my desk. It was piled so deep, it might as well have been an archaeological dig. Each successive inch took me farther back in time.

How was it possible to hold on to so many magazines? Why did I leave the papers I left, where I left them?

I am mostly done now. The final push will be to categorize and file all the CDs and DVDs now neatly, but randomly, piled to my right. That’s a major job in and of itself since many aren’t labeled.

Can I blame my folks for that too?

Meanwhile, for the time being, you can see my desktop and you can see the floor. Even I’m impressed.

Network TV – Home Video

SNL Lazy Sunday Chris Parnell and Adam SambergLast week I wrote about Saturday Night Live’s “Christmastime For The Jews,” but obviously missed the most buzzworthy segment from that show, “Lazy Sunday,” with Chris Parnell and Adam Samberg.

From The New York Times:

Since it was originally broadcast on NBC, “Lazy Sunday” has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times from the video-sharing Web site YouTube.com; it has cracked the upper echelons of the video charts at NBC.com and the iTunes Music Store; and it has even inspired a line of T-shirts, available at Teetastic.com.

When it aired, I hit the rewind button to see it again, and I too have watched it on the net. It’s very clever. I’m too old to get all the cultural references, as Steffie was glad to point out.

Today’s Times splashed this story across the front page of the Arts section. Here’s what I learned that impressed me the most:

On the evening of Dec. 12, the four wrote a song about “two guys rapping about very lame, sensitive stuff,” as Mr. Samberg described it. They recorded it the following night in the office Mr. Samberg shares with Mr. Schaffer and Mr. Taccone at “SNL,” using a laptop computer that Mr. Taccone bought on Craigslist.

Then, while their colleagues were rehearsing and rewriting that Saturday’s show, the group spent the morning of Dec. 15 shooting their video with a borrowed camera, using the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Chelsea to stand in for a multiplex cinema and Mr. Taccone’s girlfriend’s sister to play a convenience-store clerk. Mr. Schaffer spent the next night – and morning – editing the video and working with technicians to bring it up to broadcast standards.

In other words, if you have talent, you no longer need the support of a major studio or broadcast network to make something good and powerful. You can shoot and edit your film at home, or in a small office, with off-the-shelf equipment that’s readily available and cheap.

That is a major change from how moving pictures have always been produced.

Yes, Parnell and Samberg needed NBC to get instant publicity and notoriety today. I’m not sure they’ll need that tomorrow.

The Storm’s Gone But It’s Getting Worse

The past 24 hours were the most difficult time yet to watch what’s going on in the areas struck by Hurricane Katrina.

First up was the emotional reporting of CNN’s Jeanne Meserve. Here’s what USAToday said.

“It’s been horrible. … You can hear people yelling for help. You can hear the dogs yelping, all of them stranded, all of them hoping someone will come,” Meserve told anchor Aaron Brown.

“Mark Biello, one of our cameramen, went out in one of the (rescue) boats to help shoot. He ended up being out for hours and told horrific tales. He saw bodies. He saw other, just unfathomable things. Dogs wrapped in electrical lines … that were being electrocuted.”

Brown said Tuesday: “Jeanne conveyed a human being’s view of what she saw. Her reporting was incredibly solid. Her humanity was incredibly real. The marriage of those two elements helped viewers understand the desperate situation.”

There was an equally emotional side to Robin Roberts live shot on Good Morning America. She had gone to the Gulf not knowing the condition of her family. This was where she grew up.

Later Tuesday morning I watched an interview with a man who had lost his wife. He was on the street, a child in tow. He seemed dazed or disoriented as he told the story of being on a rooftop, holding his wife’s hand and then having her slip away.

As she drifted off, she asked him to take care of their family.

It was as sad a moment as could be seen. This man was the embodiment of human tragedy.

When the reporter asked the man where he would go, he didn’t know. His simplicity was his eloquence.

I’m hoping that sentence makes sense to you. I wish I could think of a better way to explain, other than to say, he didn’t need to speak volumes of words to have his plight understood.

I got an email from my friend whose mother had been evacuated from New Orleans home he grew up in to Baton Rouge.

She just called from BR. She’s now being moved to a new shelter in downtown BR because the school where she’s been since Sunday opens tomorrow. Since she probably won’t be going back to NO for sometime, as it’s being evacuated, I told her, once they feel it’s safe, we’ll fly her up to Connecticut and buy her clothes and get her settled. Once NO is able to open up, which could be a month, we’ll go down and survey the damage and decide where she’ll move and get her a new car.

New Orleans looks like a war zone. Very very sad..

Until today this had been a New Orleans story. There is plenty of damage farther east in Mississippi and Alabama. The pre-Katrina story had been set-up better in New Orleans. Now it’s all coming into perspective.

In Mississippi and Alabama the damage has been done. In New Orleans additional damage is piling on.

The breach of a levee I wrote about yesterday continued to pour Lake Ponchartrain into the city. Attempts to stop or slow the flow failed. As i understand it, flood control pumps only would pump the water back into the lake – a vicious cycle.

Civil law began to break down today. Looters were out in force. I watched people brazenly fillet a Wal*Mart. People were walking around with carts, as if they were really shopping.

CNN reported tonight there had been shootings and carjackings.

The city is preparing to move everyone out of the Superdome. It hasn’t been said, but I assume people inside are becoming volatile.

The New York Times is reporting a naval contingent on its way to New Orleans. Where have they been? Why wasn’t this done sooner? I don’t know.

Since the hurricane, the weather has been fine. On the Gulf that won’t last. Thunderstorms will fire up. There’s even the chance of more tropical trouble from the Gulf. After all, the hurricane season doesn’t peak for another few weeks.

Fewer Movie Seats Filled

The New York Times had an interesting article on movies and why fewer people are seeing them this summer.

Multiples theories for the decline abound: a failure of studio marketing, the rising price of gas, the lure of alternate entertainment, even the prevalence of commercials and pesky cellphones inside once-sacrosanct theaters. But many movie executives and industry experts are beginning to conclude that something more fundamental is at work: Too many Hollywood movies these days, they say, just are not good enough.

Let me add one more: the Internet.

Hold on, not in the way you think.

The Internet has become the instant disseminator of intelligence. Some is good and useful, some is bad and misleading. The good Internet intelligence has sped the process of word-of mouth. When a movie stinks, you can find out right away!

Go to Google to find a movie’s showtimes. The first thing you see is a link to reviews and a ‘master’ rating.

I’m afraid, to a certain extent, the Internet’s intelligence has also made us incredibly price conscious – probably to our own detriment. Recently, I’ve been telling friends how big companies avoid customer service since it’s a ‘loss center.’

If we’re only buying on price (and I’m as guilty as anyone), why provide customer service? It’s no longer part of the purchasing equation.

Try to find the corporate office of your cellphone or cable company, or see if you can reach someone authorized to actually help you with any consumer problem. It’s difficult and becoming more difficult by the day.

So, we don’t go to movies because we hear how mediocre or not great they are. And, nowadays, mediocre or not great is not enough… especially when you’re valuing movies by price.

Who Is Andrew Breitbart And Why Is Matt Drudge Throwing Him All Those Links?

I’m a habitue of Drudge. Though Matt Drudge has a political and sometimes social agenda, the site links to news I find interesting and does it on a fast and constant basis. Drudge is mostly a collector of news rather than a reporter. Just about all his headlines point to stories on other sites.

Until recently, most of Drudge’s stories came from traditional sources. If a story was actually from the Associated Press, he’d find a website carrying it and link there. You’d be directed to a newspaper, TV station, magazine or Yahoo, which carries wire service reports.

Now, he’s started linking to lots of stories on breitbart.com. Breitbart.com looks like an automated aggregator of AP and Reuters wire stories.

Quite honestly, I’d never heard of it or of Andrew Breitbart, the person whose telephone number is listed as the contact for the web address.

I’m not in Los Angeles, but I used Google’s mapping facility to look at breitbart.com’s physical address. It looks like a residential area just off the San Diego Freeway and near UCLA.

Then I started checking his name. Here’s a quote from Andrew Breitbart on author Roger Simon’s site.

The New York Times got it right — I am amicably leaving the Drudge Report after a long and close working relationship with Matt Drudge, a man who will rightfully take his place in the history books as an Internet news pioneer. I am also excited to be a partner in an inspired new endeavor, the Huffington Post. The last time I worked with Arianna she got a guy who didn’t deserve to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery disinterred. That was cool. I admit: I like to go where the action is.

And, if you go to the Internet Archives and look at some older breitbart.com pages, they actually show Drudge’s site. Well, they all do except this one. Oops.

So, it looks like Breitbart is now somehow connected with Arianna Huffington – liberal and, once again, Matt Drudge – conservative.

Is Drudge is sending all this traffic Breitbart’s way out of the goodness of his heart?

There’s nothing nefarious here (well nothing I can see). If there’s a financial relationship between Breitbart and Drudge, traditional journalists might question the ethical connotations of linking for profit. There’s nothing I’ve looked at that says that’s what’s happening and far be it from me to judge ethics. I just don’t know.

I’m writing what I found because I saw unusual online behavior and put 2+2 together. It’s all out in the open.

For me, it was interesting to see this new website spring up and get much of Drudge’s business. That’s where my curiosity kicked in. If you can aggregate tens or hundreds of thousands of hits… or more, Google ads (or similar ads, sold by others and placed on your site) alone could make a small, automated website very profitable with little investment or ongoing effort.

Blogger’s note: While looking through more websites, trying to read up on Andrew Breitbart, I stumbled on the fact that his father-in-law is Orson Bean. If the name means nothing to you, don’t worry. If you’re my age, Orson Bean was a very witty New Englander who worked the TV game show circuit in the 60s and 70s. I was a big fan. I wondered where he went.

War of the Worlds Weirdness

There’s a big article splashed on the New York Times front page concerning Tom Cruise and what has been perceived as strange behavior. I didn’t see the behavior – I don’t know.

There’s talk about how this might affect the filming of Mission Impossible III and the opening of War Of The Worlds in a few weeks.

Is everything OK? Are there problems? Officially everyone says it’s OK, but I was struck by this quote from the Times article:

The two studios have already curtailed the normal promotional press junket ahead of the June 29 release of “War of the Worlds,” limiting it to what Mr. Levy called a smaller number of “preselected interview sessions.” He said the decision had nothing to do with Mr. Cruise but was made because there had been enough promotion already.

Enough promotion already? Please! Let me put this down with, “left to spend more time with his family,” or “pursue other career opportunities,” or “settled without admitting guilt.”

Something doesn’t smell right… and with this much Hollywood money at stake, something’s surely gone wrong. After all, these are people would greenlight Hitler’s new screenplay if it promised to open big.

Odds And Ends After A Busy Day

This was a busy day, spent mostly at Universal Studios Hollywood. Please note – it’s not in Hollywood, but Universal City.

I just don’t have the time to write right now and will try and cover it tomorrow as we move to Palm Springs. In the meantime, there are some things about Los Angeles that are just different… maybe even weird.

It’s possible I’m the one living in space, but it seems odd you have to pay for parking everywhere you go. I’m talking about the mall, restaurants, everywhere. In Connecticut, this is just not the case. A mall that tried to charge for parking would be laughed out of existence.

I mentioned this a few days ago, but it bears repeating. If you go for an expensive meal, can’t they hide the $3-$5 they’re going to charge for parking in the bill? I don’t like paying for it after my meal. It seems cheesy.

I’m not picking on any one, because this is an everyone situation.

In many ways this is like the hidden fees and charge that mysteriously show up on cell phone bills.

And, if a restaurant validates your parking ticket, then they should pick up the whole tab. Don’t leave me with $1.50 owed, as was the case at breakfast today.

Oh there’s one bright spot to this parking stuff. While waiting for your car to be retrieved, you get to see California’s conspicuous love affair with the automobile on display. There have been plenty of Bentley’s and Rolls, a few Ferraris, Jags, Porsches (including the SUV) and Mercedes up the ying yang (whatever that means) at the valet parking stand.

Cars here are in a perpetual state of clean and shiny! There is never road salt. The humidity is low virtually all year, which reduces corrosion. They have never seen a streaked windshield when the defroster can’t keep up with the cold, or had salty spray thrown onto their windshield from the tires of the car ahead of them. SUVs here are nearly all two wheel drive!

We’re leaving Los Angeles tomorrow for the real desert. I’ve got the forecast for Palm Springs in front of me, and it looks like some rain for each of the three days we’re there! On the other hand a viewer wrote from Connecticut asking, why snowflakes are sometimes huge&#185… as they were today. I’ll take a rainy Palm Springs.

I’ve been trying to decide what to write when the vacation is over. I want to write some sort of synopsis of the trip, but more lifestyle oriented than the play-by-play I’ve written for the past week.

My goal would be to illustrate it with some of the hundreds and hundreds of photos I’ve taken. The New York Times has an interesting technique using Macromedia Flash with which they create narrated slide shows. I’d like to try that. We’ll see if it’s over my head.

It probably is.

&#185 – Snowflakes that fall through a layer with temperatures just above freezing become very sticky to each other. Multiple snow crystals attach and form huge fluffy flakes. This is normally ‘wet snow’, with a low snow to water ratio, and very good for packing as snowballs.

Sex In the Gray Lady

It’s interesting to read something in the New York Times when the Times is a little squeamish about the content. This is not a rag that will publish salacious stuff just for the titillation factor. Sometimes, however, a story requires explicit sexual content.

Take the case of the two celebrity hawks that live on the edge of Central Park:

And close observers in Central Park could not have missed other evidence in early March. For more than a week, with Lola perched on the nearby balconies or roofs of opulent Fifth Avenue apartment buildings, and with Pale Male swooping down from the sky, the two birds copulated frequently, Ms. Winn said

If you can suffer through the rest of this hard core activity, the full story can be found here.