Random Stuff

Auld Lang Sally

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‘A very Harry New Year to you and yours’

The Dude and I rarely venture out on New Year’s Eve (‘Amateur Night’, he calls it. Though I think it’s really because it’s impossible to get a cab.) You can see from the rather undignified photo at the top of this post that this was not always the case. (If it looks a little blurry, that’s because it is. Unless, of course, you’ve already started celebrating. In which case, it’s really blurry.)

Instead, we like to stay in and drink champagne and watch movies then drink more champagne and watch more movies. Though one year we did drink champagne and build a paper model of the Empire State Building on the coffee table. I think watching the movies is marginally more exciting.

Speaking of which, the movie to watch on New Year’s Eve is, in my humble opinion, ‘When Harry Met Sally’. It’s one of Nora Ephron’s funniest scripts and a much more successful directorial effort on Rob Reiner’s part than Continue reading

Oh no, Danger Man

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‘Somebody’s gonna get hurt’

As some of you blog fans know (‘blog fans’; ow, how unattractive does that sound?), I was toying with the idea of writing about Scots and New Yorkers. But I thought that might be a tad incendiary, at least before The Vote. So Danger Man it is.

You’ve seen Danger Man. He’s everywhere: not riding his horse, not riding his skateboard, not riding his motorcycle.

Danger Man has kids who walk to school. He has a wife who lives on bathroom doors. He has dogs, cats, farm animals, and lots of machinery. But most of all, Continue reading

(Silly) Signs of the times

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Jury duty today. Lots of downtime, so no more excuses for ‘post procrastination’. While hanging about waiting to be funneled through the metal detector, I noticed several rather daunting signs involving incarceration. Which set me to musing about other signs I’ve seen, some rather (unintentionally, I can only assume) hilarious.

A few of these: The Our Lady of Perpetual Help Business School, the (ahem) Karen Horney Clinic, and the Master Cabbie Taxi Academy — where, during a particularly exasperating period of freelance fatigue, I imagined myself working. I practiced answering their phone, in my best receptionist tones: ‘Master Cabbie Taxi Academy. How may I direct your call?’

But few signs please me more than the punny ones. Laundry and dry cleaning establishments seem to have a corner on the market here. Among my favorites: Continue reading

What’s up with all the apps?

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‘Silly, Stupid, Sophomoric, and Even Dumb’

Today I sent a NY Times article to the Child (I do this kind of thing with annoying frequency.) Her reply? ‘Write a blog post about it.’ (She’s been urging me to get off my FB-trolling butt and do this Blog Thing for ages.) So, if you made it this far, you are reading the blog post. And if you’d like to go further, here is the article, subtitled ‘Surprising, Scandalous, Serious, Even Inspiring’:

‘Apps for Sharing Secrets and Gossip’

But wait! Before you leave my first ‘real’ post, let me summarize. And editorialize. The article is about some cool new apps that do all kinds of tasks that you didn’t know needed to be done. One of them, Secret, according to the Times, ‘encourages airing information or feelings that might not otherwise be shared’.

Another, Whisper, lets you let the world know Continue reading