They should just take this guy's house away and all his stuff, and let the Chinese cook live there...

Link: New York Daily News - Home - Busted in rent-control tenant toss.

So ugly its almost...well, no...its ugly., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I'm sure this dog is well loved by its owner, but definitely not for its looks.  Poor thing.

Cooled off, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Rain washes heat away in NYC.

Hilarious!  Thanks Hunter!

Link: This is going to be BIG! - Jamba is a goldmine..

"Still amazed by the volume constriction that seems to occur during the blending process. I mean, you can suck down a smoothie with no problems, but try to eat four scoops of ice, half glass of OJ, two bananas, eight strawberries and half a frozen mango? No way."

Jamba is a goldmine., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Always packed.

Instead of buying ten apples, I accidently bought ten "family packs" of six apples each.

If anyone wants any apples, I have some... well... a lot of them.

You're welcome to come over and make some apple pie, apple cobbler, apple preserves, or apple sauce.

I'll be bringing some apples into work, too.

Perhaps Kerri will cut up some apples to go in her cereal.

Apple.

Apple.

Elevator Shaft, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Meetpacking district company visits with Fred.

I'm fully supportive of this:

WALKEN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2008

A message from the next President of the United States:

walken2008 (comedy_not_real).wav
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We're looking for a cross platform way to present meetings over the web.  We don't need that much online Q&A, but that's nice, but basically we want a sturdy, glitch proof way that dial-up people to our meetings can look at presentations over the web behind a password. 

Which service to people recommend?

A lot of these free trials have ten person limits, too... that sucks.

I don't know wheather this is a quote or Elyssa wrote it, but its pretty cool.

Link: lispsugrl: RIP Common Sense.

I'm fully intent on going to this...  who's in?

Link: Ram News.

Bronx, NY - (June 27, 2005) – The Fordham University men’s basketball Rams will open the 2005-06 season in paradise. The Paradise Jam, that is. Six Division I men’s basketball teams are gearing up for a trip to paradise at the sixth annual Paradise Jam Basketball Tournament hosted by the University of the Virgin Islands in St. Thomas.

The year was 1994.  I was a sophomore at Regis.   

I had recently been introduced to the Mecca that was the local all-girls high schools.  When you go to an all-guys high school, getting an "in" to your sister school was like finding the Holy Grail.

So there I was, with some newly minted friends from Marymount and the older Regis guys they hung out with, and they couldn't wait to see Pulp Fiction.  I was largely unaware of what I was going to see.  In fact, I remember being largely unaware of a lot of cool pop cultural stuff at the time, aside from what I heard on Z100 or from my Brooklyn friends.  I remember in freshmen year being told who the Ramones were by this girl Veronica I met at a Regis dance.  The Ramones!   What a sheltered life. 

Anyway, Pulp Fiction was, by far, the coolest thing I'd ever seen on the screen.  It was edgy, creative, and totally unlike anything else.  I must have easily seen it ten times in the movie theater... also because it played FOREVER.  You could always find it playing somewhere in the city. 

Pulp Fiction marked the resurrection of John Travolta's career as well.  He'd just come off the second sequal of "Look Who's Talking"... (yes, they made THREE of those movies) and hadn't done much since... well, since the early 80's. 

Another first.... it was also the first time was saw all this mix and matching with storylines that were out of order and tied back into each other.  When I saw that the diner scene tied back into itself, I was really wowed.

All the characters...   well, they're all just so fantastic and how many lines from this movie just got repeated over and over again?   "Check out the big brain on ______."   From Pumpkin and Honeybunny to Jules to the Wolf, the casting is kind of like watching art. 

And its got a Christopher Walken monologue...  This scene is just hilarious.  "And I hid the watch..."

There isn't one thing I would have done differently with this movie.  I love every character.  Every scene is art.  Every line is so carefully constructed.  It was part of growing up for me.  I owned the soundtrack, too...  great soundtrack.  Everyone my age had it. 

I think of this list like the Hall of Fame, but some of the movies are like Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb.  They're just on another level that would be a list of like 5 or 10 or something and not make for much interesting comparison.  Pulp Fiction is on that list, Shawshank, and few others.  Truly greay.

Quality quotes from Evelyn

Link: Crossroads Dispatches: Friday Thoughts on Art, Brands, Perfection in Blogs and Business.

In large measure becoming an artist consists in learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal, and in following your own voice, which makes your work distinctive.

What veteran artists know about each other is that they have engaged the issues that matter to them.

To make art is to sing with the human voice. To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have.

Dogsitting instructions, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Now I know exactly how to handle what comes out of Joy.

My parents are selling their house, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Bensonhurst...well kept 2br.  Finished basement.  I think they're asking 525K.

Maybe we're related..., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I was biking down Ft. Hamilton Pkwy by Greenwood Cemetery, and this stone caught my eye.



Anna Hines O'Donnell Ross 1811-1875.  She died 130 years ago, but maybe a long lost relative.  Interesting...wonder what this street looked like when she was buried.

So its a couple of days late and I posted Shawshank last week, so now I've got to come up with something to top it or even on par, right?

Nope.

Not even going to try.

This is a pure Charlie's favorite.  I won't vouch for any kind of quality.  No Oscar caliber performances here.

What do you get when you combine Rammstein, hot chics, fast cars and a bald guy?

No, its not my blog...

Its Vin Diesel in "XXX".

"XXX" is just gratuitous entertainment.  Things go fast, things blow up, and there's cool music from Queens of the Stone Age, Orbital, and  Drowning Pool.  Did I mention things blowing up?  Its also got fantastic lines like, "I like anything fast enough to do something stupid in."

Truly an award winning performance from Vin Diesel--he actually got nominated for Best Male Performance at the MTV Movie Awards. 

At 5.5 stars, its got one of the lowest movie ratings I've seen on IMDB.... but to be honest, how could you dislike this movie if you went to go see it?  You knew it had Vin Diesel in it.  What did you expect?  Where there not enough things exploding?  Should the music have been louder? 

This ain't no Shawshank, folks.  Its the guy who did Riddick.

On September 11, 2001, after the first tower fell, it was time to go home.  I watched it live from the trading room television at GM, and we were all kind of dumbstruck until then.  I don't remember standing there for as long as I did, but I remember watching the smoke clear and realizing the building wasn't there anymore. 

Time to go home.

I had only been in my apartment for a little over two months.  Many of my friends were still up at Fordham, and there wasn't really any getting up there.  The subway and Metro North was shut down.  So, when I arrived, there wasn't much to do but watch...   and when I turned on the television, there was Peter Jennings. 

He came on and he stayed on.

I distinctly remember IMing with Brian saying how unbelievable it was how much time he was on the air.  It just seemed like anytime you turned the television on, there was Peter Jennings.  Amazing.  Comforting.  I watched.  I checked the internet every now and then, but for the most part, I was watching TV.  I needed to see it and I needed to hear someone talking to me... and not just some talking head.  This was someone we all knew. 

The disaggregation of media and television probably means that there will never be another bigtime network news anchor.  Brian Williams?  Charles Gibson?  Not quite so much.  Good, but not great.  I'm glad, though, that for what I hope to be the most dramatic and tragic moment in my life, I had one of these guys to sit down to and watch.

When I was a freshman at Fordham, I had, three days a week, an 8:30AM class and a 12:30PM class.  The 8:30 was 50 minutes long, which gave me a solid 2 1/2 hour window of time  until my next class.

What unfolded was the careful and intricate development of something that I would later term, "the Nap."

That idea would be improved upon and get replaced by "The Power Nap". 

You knew it was truly a Power Nap if there was drool on the pillow when I woke up.  I would walk in from the 8:30, drop my bookbag, take my shoes off and just fall onto the bed.  This would lead to a debate between me and my roommate Kevin as to why I wouldn't take clothes off and/or get under the covers.  Of course, that's the difference between a nap and actual sleeping, but we would debate the semantics of sleeping for some time. 

The Power Nap was a freshman year institution.  I felt so refreshed by it, but schedules changed, I'd have three roommates in sophomore year and the Power Nap fell by the wayside.  But, for a semester, like clockwork, I was King of the Nap and it was wonderful.

I bring this up, because I just played softball on Brian's team (which is why I wasn't at the boathouse) and I was tired from the sun and yesterday's long day.  I found myself with the inclination to return to the nap, proceeded to follow up on this inclination.  Clothes on.  Above the covers.  Drool on the pillow.  Like the eldar Ted Williams at the All-Star game, the Power Nap has reemerged to come out and see the fans one more time.

So, I now have direct evidence that a Kryptonite lock is so crappy, that thieves will cut it in broad daylight at 5PM in the afternoon on 20th and Broadway, right across the street from a busy restaurant.

I might as well have locked it up with tinker toys and some bendy straws.  At least the thief would have hesitated for a moment out of sheer confusion. 

Yes, my bike got stolen.  So, you can add that to the list of things I've had stolen in the past two and a half months...     digital camera, wallet, and now, bike.

The funny thing is that I kinda wanted a new one and didn't want to go through the hassle of selling it.  I should start looking on Craigslist right now for my bike,  no?  Where else would thieves sell it?   

While Googling "bike lojack" I found the following idea on a comment page.  Pure humor and not such a bad idea:

Link: Halfbakery: Bike LoJack.

How about if the bike is pedalled away without entering the secret code (rear brakes twice, backpedal one revolution, then front brakes once) a spike shoots up out of the seat. Wouldn't have to go very far at all to retrieve your bike then...