what about the plastic animals?

What's that smell?

Oatmeal?

Riding the subway on the way back from the farmer's market I noticed that the train smelled really bad.  I didn't see any smelly looking people in the car.  Switched lines at Times Square and noticed that the 1 train was also stinky.  Again there weren't any smelly looking people on board.  It was then that I realized that I was the stinky person.  More precisely it was the cheese I bought at the market that was the source of the smell.  The cheese, spread on a chunk of rosemary bread, made for a tasty lunch.

Three Piece Reclining Figure: Draped (1975)

People loved looking into Three Piece.   I could have spend an hour just watching everyone interact with the sculpture.  It was located off the beaten path in a corner of the botanical garden.  Thus, no foul-mouthed pre-K gangsters!

J. R. Simplot died last week.  He was 99.  I had never heard of him until I read his obituary.  He was one of the richest people in America because his country perfected the frozen french fry back in the 1960s.  He then made a deal with Ray Kroc to be the frozen fry supplier to McDonald's.  The description of how he got started in business is pretty amazing.  He left home at 14 after his father refused to let him go to a basketball game. Then...

His mother gave him $20 in gold coins, and he moved into a $1-a-night hotel in a nearby town. There were teachers living in the hotel who were being paid in interest-bearing scrip. Jack bought them at 50 cents on the dollar and sold them to a bank for 90 cents on the dollar.

He used this profit to buy a rifle, an old truck and either 600 or 700 hogs (accounts vary) at $1 a head. He used the rifle to shoot wild horses, which — after stripping the hides for future sale at $2 each — he mixed with potatoes and cooked on sagebrush-fueled flames. The hogs ate the result. When he sold the fattened pigs, Mr. Simplot made more than $7,000.

That gave him capital to buy farm machinery and six horses and become a potato farmer...

To honor him we should all eat McDonald's french fries.

Hill Arches

I have a charming story to relate!  Before last fall I hadn't been to the New York Botanical Garden in years.  On Sunday I went for the third time in six months.  The garden is having two exhibits I wanted to see:  Darwin's Garden and Moore in America.  The latter is the largest collection of Henry Moore's works ever exhibited in North America.  Both exhibits are excellent and well-worth seeing.  If that's not enough excitement there's a giant turtle in the Bronx River.

On to the charming story!  There were two boys, about four years old each, and a guy I took for their father when I approached Hill Arches, the sculpture above.  Then I noticed the guy wasn't paying attention to the kids and subsequently went away.  I waited for the kids to return to their nowhere nearby parents so I could take a clean photo of the sculpture.  A different family walked up.  Their son, who was about the same age as the original kids, tentatively approached the sculpture.  The original kids stopped playing, threw back their shoulders, balled up their tiny fists and got in the face of the new guy.  One kid started yelling "F*** you a$$!  F*** you a$$!  F*** you a$$!" 

Charming, right? 

The new kid ran bawling back to his mother.  Mom, and everyone else within earshot, was astonished.  A woman walked over from the row of tulip trees to the left.  The mother of the offended boy said "Your son said 'F*** you a$$' to my child."  The arriving woman replied "That's not my son," then grabbed him and his companion and walked away.  Everyone but me took their leave of the Henry Moore sculpture and I got my picture.

Big Turtle

Where does a giant snapping turtle sun itself?  Anywhere it wants.  In this case the turtle was on a rock in the Bronx River.  I saw it Sunday in back of the Snuff Mill at the New York Botanical Garden.

Bee and Flowers

This took a little patience.

Strawberries

A little early?  I am not complaining.

Kalahari Begins Deconstructing Before Construction is Done

The Kalahari, whose construction I have lovingly chronicled through the last couple of years, began self-destructing Thursday afternoon (check out my fine Photoshop skills in that Gothamist article).  A three-story high chunk of the exterior wall on the 115th St. building peeled away and fell on the Harlem Market below.  By Thursday night a demolition crew had started removing the remainder of the wall's exterior.  The crew is just about done removing the exterior of the 116th St. building today.  There's more pictures in this Flickr set.

Walk This Way

A couple weeks ago I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and saw these odd markings on the street at the pedestrian entrance/exit on the Brooklyn side.  It turns out they were for a series of lighted arrows to help people find the entrance (for a landmark structure, the entrance is pretty hard to find).  Tonight was the bridge's 125th anniversary celebration, complete with these new lights, new energy efficient lighting on the bridge cables, and fireworks.  Today was the first day of the telectroscope, which is an underground telescopic tunnel that lets New Yorkers see Londoners and vice versa, and there will soon be a temporary waterfall under the bridge.  A two-year, 300 million dollar renovation of the bridge begins in 2009.

Clever

I get a lot of spam in my work email account.  Sometimes I read the Nigerian scam spam because they are fun.  Take this excerpt from today for example:

Note carefully the content of the crate is "MONEY" but I did not disclose it to the Courier Services as Money, rather I informed them that the crate contain Vital "DIPLOMATIC DOCUMENTS" belonging to my client (that´s you).

A plot device worthy of Snidely Whiplash, complete with comic sans font!  I wonder if the person writing this twirled his handlebar moustache and cackled gleefully "They'll never uncover my clever ruse" as he wrote that.

Way Below 168th Street

The 1 train platform at 168th Street.  Because it is deep underground this is one of the few platforms with an arched ceiling rather than posts.

Sorry for the image size.  Typepad introduced a new interface today and I haven't figured out how to make the image the correct size.  Figured it out.