St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Saks Fifth Avenue

Apple’s Tuunder ‘n Lightin’

This is where we have fun with captions:

Professor Pretzel

Mr. Serious Munchies

Midtown Mangeur

A Gentleman Through Time

The Mystery Guest on Park Avenue

Downtowner will not stop in Midtown!

Just follow the suits, mister.

Just follow the suits, lady.

Hot Dogs and Bowties

Nice coat!

Mr Snappy.

Nice Tallulah zingers here and there, but they could have left out the rest of the play and just forwarded the zingers in email.

Valerie Harper mangles the Tallulah style.  She plays her all drunk and vulgar.  If you go to YouTube and check out a few clips of the real Tallulah, you’ll see the real woman may have been drunk, and may have had some salty things on her mind, but she was a very graceful, classy presence.  Which is exactly why – hellooo! – she could pull off being loose and addicted and still be interesting.  Somehow that little gem of characterization got lost on this team.

But that isn’t the worst of it.  The worst is that, for no reason except that it may apparently be a gay fantasy, Act 2 of the play melts into a squishy meatloaf thick scene of gay confessions of gay repression to Tallulah.  Well isn’t that just every gay man’s fantasy: If you were in the closet, to be able to come out strong to a loving and caring Tallulah Bankhead??

I thought I was coming to see a play about Tallulah Bankhead, her times, the issues she dealt with… Instead I get yet another play about a guy who wants to come out.  Why?  Tallulah wasn’t interesting enough?  Is a play not a play anymore if a guy doesn’t reveal he’s gay?

But man is it good.  Melt in your mouth softness, a nice smooth taste.  I wolfed my little brick down by itself and with apples.  Not your typical apple cheese, but wow.  I guess, since it’s so soft, you’d more likely be spreading it on crackers or bread.  But still, just fine with apples.  The taste is like a great vanilla ice cream, but without the vanilla flavor, and it isn’t really gonna melt.  Does that make sense?

It’s a mixture of cow’s milk and sheep’s milk, comes from Northern Italy.  High fat content, which may explain the awesome taste.  So who cares??

Looking around the web, looks like the 8oz brick normally goes for around $15.  Maybe Gourmet Garage isn’t above pulling a fast one with deceptive sale pricing signs.

I use the Google API’s jQuery, and it automatically upgraded my whole site to jQuery 1.4.   In jQuery 1.4, they decided to tighten up the JSON parsing engine, so that it is now unforgiving of any lax standards.  You have to follow the JSON standard spelled out here — to the letter.  In my case, that meant changing any single quoted values or names to double quotes, and getting rid of opening and closing parentheses.  Like most fixes, it was an easy fix, once I figured it out.  Hope this helps.

-Colin

Teddy White had a fascination with politics and power that probably approached some kind of clinical obsession.  We follow him from his early days as a reporter in China, before the outbreak of WWII, and then through the war years in Asia, reconstruction in Europe, and then 60’s and 70’s presidential politics in the US.   Throughout, he describes his fascination with the big players:  Chiang Kai Check, Mao Tse Tsung, MacArthur, Monnet, Harriman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and his efforts to cultivate relationships with these men.

Obviously he had to get to know them, he was reporting back for Time and other weeklies.  But he seems to have been very very eager, for reasons that go beyond the merely professional, to hobnob and get to know these guys.  As if he got his personal thrills, his shivers in life, from being around the movers and the shakers.  A fascinating self-portrait, because it would seem like the next logical step would be to try to become one of the movers and shakers.  And you see him dip his toe in, with advice given here, messages passed there, that go beyond, arguably, the duties of a journalist.  But he always backed away, retreating to the safety of his self-avowed journalistic professionalism.  A moth playing with a candle fire, fluttering around it, backing away as soon as it feels the heat on its wings.

So you get a double treat here, a great tour of 20th century politics, and a portrait of a very complicated, driven, yet somewhat repressed, personality.

Buy it at Amazon

No such luck.  On my first visit, they ripped me off and still didn’t fix the problem.  The kicker is, the problem turned out to be so simple, I ended up fixing it myself, and am stunned and disappointed they didn’t find it themselves.

I was driving across midtown and a coolant hose blew, a hose that takes coolant from the engine block into the bulkhead.  The hose didn’t break, it just burst off its fitting.  I didn’t realize this until I had already called the tow truck.  ( I was on 51st Street, right by St. Patrick’s, at 9 AM.  The best thing to do was get out of traffic fast).

I got a tow to Cybert, who had done my annual inspection.  The owner assigned a mechanic to the truck, and told me they would call me to tell me what they had found and give me an estimate of the repairs.

The mechanic called that afternoon, and in barely intelligible English (he was African) said he had replaced the hose and that with a coolant flush and radiator pressure test it was going to cost $370 or thereabouts.

“Well, what had been the problem?” I asked.

“Bad hose.  Replaced hose.”

“That sounds like the symptom.”

“Hmm?”

“I’m saying, what would cause pressure to build up to the point that a hose would pop off its fitting?”

“It’s a old hose.  You want coolant flush?”

“Can I talk to the owner?”

“Ok, one minute.”

The owner got on the phone, I started to ask him what he thought the root of the problem might be.

“Look, it’s gotten really busy.  I understand George has got it fixed.  He’ll tell you about it.”  Seriously.  I was smelling the snow job.

George was back on the line.

“You want the flush and pressure test? $375?”

“I’m trying to understand what the problem was.”

“Is an old hose.  That’s it.  Somethin always gonna break.  That was it.”

“That was it?”

“Yeah!”

“Ok.”

What else am I suppose to do over the phone?  Apparently $375 is not enough to allow for a discussion of causes and symptoms.

I got the flush and pressure test done, and picked up the truck that evening, for $375.

I was suspicious, so I drove it around midtown traffic for an hour, half hoping the hose would burst again, or the temperature gauge would shoot up, as it had right before the hose burst.  No such luck, everything was fine, and I took the truck back to its garage, with a lingering feeling of auto-angst.

The following weekend on a Saturday evening, I took the truck out for a road trip to Hofstra, in Long Island,  to go see a friend in a concert.  Had to be there by 8PM.  Never made it.

I was on 495 going past LeFrak city in Queens (one of the ugliest landscapes in NYC) and the temperature gauge  – which had been suspiciously high — shot up into the red.  I pulled over to the shoulder and had no choice but to let the engine cool down.   When it was cool I drove off again.  Within six miles, the gauge shot up again.  I pulled over.  It went on like this until I managed to pull into a gas station and, with nothing else to try, decided to buy some antifreeze and see if the level was low.  I really couldn’t think of any other explanation.

Turns out it was low.  I ended up adding a gallon of antifreeze to the system.  Now, why was it low?  Cybert had just filled it earlier in the week.  They had pressure tested it, and found no leaks.  I never saw any leaks beneath the truck where I parked.

Turns out, believe it or not, that the culprit was the seal on the radiator cap.  Yes.  A little rubber seal the size of a silver dollar.  It was not broken.  It was just bent over itself.  So it wasn’t sealing well.  I was at wits end, and didn’t think that unbending the seal would solve this problem, but I had to try something.  So I unbent the seal,  set it right in the cap, and haven’t had a problem since.

I guess the bad seal was letting some coolant evaporate off the top, thereby bringing the level down too low to cool well, etc….  That’s  the only explanation I can think of.

Now, why couldn’t the guys at Cybert have just taken a look at that radiator cap?  Isn’t that the first thing one does, the first thing a pro does, with radiator issues?   They didn’t do it because they just don’t give a damn.  They just want to charge for big ticket service (radiator flush, pressure test), get you out, and move on.

Well, fuck them, I have moved on.  Will never be back.

But I have to ask: if the magazine app wasn’t a hit on PCs, why would it be a hit on tablets?  The same problem will exist on tablets:  readers will be able to get their news and pictures from other normal web sites that don’t charge, just like they can on a PC.

So what if the tablet will have dimensions more like those of a magazine?  So what if it will make for a better “lean back” experience?  These qualities will make reading the same old free internet from the comfort of your couch a much better experience, too.

Web page designers might redesign their sites to fit the tablet format better, just like they created smart phone versions of their sites.

Basically, on tablets like on PCs, if you can get if for free, why ever would you pay?

I see two freighters trolling with a big net between them, picking up a current of garbage, and then maybe using it as fuel, rather than storing it (incinerating plant would have to be built in to the freighters).

This could be funded by the plastics council, and therefore, plastics manufacturers, since most of the garbage out there is plastic.