what about the plastic animals?

Carvel

Today we should have a spine-tingling story of passion, despair, redemption and the virtues of a cherry cola poured by a soda jerk.  We should.  Instead we get a story of me getting sweaty on my bicycle.

I volunteered to organize a photo walk of the South Bronx in a few weeks so I've been spending my Sunday mornings trying to piece the walk together.  Greg and I walked the route recently and it looks photogenic enough.  The last couple of rides I've made have been to fine tune a couple of sections.

Even though I left at 7:30 yesterday morning, and I was riding at a slow speed, it was so hot and humid that I was a big sweat ball within a matter of minutes.  After the reconnaissance mission was complete I got some exercise by riding speedily up Park Ave. to Fordham and back. 

Fire hydrants that have the sprayer attachments?  Very, very appreciated.
Fruit stands on Fordham Rd. that sell banana-papaya frosties?  Very, very appreciated.
Carvel on Webster Rd?  Having just finished the frosty I only stopped to take a picture.
More fire hydrants that have sprayer attachments?  Very, very appreciated.

I got home around 10:30.  Exhausted and drenched I take a cool shower.  Then it is up to Morningside Heights for breakfast and to get milk at the farmer's market.  My life would be much simpler if I bought milk at the grocery store downstairs, but the fresh milk from the Milk Thistle Dairy is so much tastier. 

The heat and humidity are oppressive as I walk slowly across town.  I pick up the Sunday paper.  Now for breakfast. 

Too late!  Tom's is packed with Seinfeld tourists.  I've never actually eaten there.  Oh well, I'll try Deluxe, which is not all that good.  I sit down at the counter and the sweat starts pouring off of me.  Buckets of it.  My shirt is totally drenched.  New York in the summer!

Thinking ahead as I type I realize there's no clever, or even satisfying, ending this the story so you might as well click on one of the links to the right and read another blog.

Anyway. For $6.75, which is actually cheap, I get burnt sausages, greasy, almost inedible home fries, four slices of bread that were waved at a toaster, and somewhere between four and six scrambled eggs.  I ordered two eggs but the eggs I received easily filled half a plate. 

Then I got a quart of lowfat and a pint of chocolate milk and went home.

Snuff Mill

Lorillard Snuff Mill along the Bronx River at the New York Botanical Garden.  Built in 1840 it is the oldest standing tobacco mill in the country.  The mill ceased operation in 1870.

Friday Flowers

A few more pictures from the New York Botanical Garden.

Time for a break as I use up the last of my vacation days for fiscal year 2007.  Back in a week or so.

Aeonium arboreum var. holochrysum

One of the plants being exhibited as part of the Darwin's Garden show at the New York Botanical Garden. This particular plant is from the Canary Islands.  Whenever I see an interesting plant like this I am reminded of the last sentence in The Origin of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

On this day in 1974, baseball in Cleveland hits a low point when Ten Cent Beer Night gets ugly.  In the early 1990s I went to see an Indians game at Municipal Stadium.  There were about 5,000 people in a stadium that seated 74,000.  It was strange.  I moved around from inning to inning, visiting pretty much every section of the park.

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.

Holiday Train Show at the New York Botanical Garden

Ellis Island

Brooklyn Bridge

Townhouses

Guggenheim Museum

My father and I spent the morning of Christmas Eve at the New York Botanical Garden's Holiday Train Show.  I went once before several years ago.  There aren't enough superlatives to describe the train show.  If you're ever in New York between Thanksgiving and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day skip Rockefeller Center (it's a big tree with too many lights and people skating on a tiny rink, big deal) and head up to the Bronx.

The holiday train show is more than trains.  The most amazing part of the show is the dozens of New York City and Hudson Valley buildings rendered in various bits of vegetation.  Bark, branches, berries, leaves, twigs, moss, mushrooms, seeds and other plant parts are put to good use recreating well-known and not-so-well-known buildings.  The main building at Ellis Island and the George Washington Bridge made their debut this year.

Most people are just at the gardens to see the train show.  After viewing the trains and buildings we escaped through to the upland rain forest section of the conservatory.  From there on we mostly had the deserts and rainforests to ourselves.  As a bonus, the garden shop has an outstanding selection of (mostly) botanically oriented tree ornaments.  I picked up an acorn and a gingerbread house ornament.

The Holiday Train Show continues until January 13th.

Hustler Barber Shop

The Hustler Barber Shop was such a hit on Flickr that I thought I should share it here.  Or, I'm just being lazy.