Manhattan Scavenger Hunt

Yesterday, we had a scavenger hunt across Manhattan. The prize was a ton of Pocky, so we called our group Pockystan. There were like 140 things on the list, so we licked street signs and got Starbucks baristas to sign coffee cups and proposed to strangers and pole-danced on street poles and rapped with strangers and got an egg from an old lady in a townhouse and yelled through central park until we found a guy named Steve and played limbo with kids and futterwacked at the Alice in Wonderland statue and argued with crazy Jesus people and raped a church and burned a woman and sang Disney songs in a drugstore and high fived cops and Mr. Softee truck guys and a guy with an awesome mustache and staged public breakups and rode the carousel and walked piggyback into a parking garage making cars noises asking for the cost to park for a day and serenaded with Shakespeare and sang the prince of bel air theme with a guy on the street and beatboxed with strangers and got free macarons and impersonated elvis in grand central station and screamed "STELLAAAA!" in a subway car and hugged another crazy Jesus person who smelled like manure. Then we did kareoke.

In other words, yesterday was awesome.

The Holiday Season

[The following was written back in late November, but I forgot about it. Enjoy it, mid-January. -scikidus]

It's finally here.

The sun sets early over New Jersey, the trees are stuck in post-peak, so the yellow sunlight illuminates the yellow leaves.

Today's Thanksgiving, and it certainly feels like it.

For the first time in years we're making a large chunk of the feast, so the house is filled with the aromas of pumpkin, nutmeg, ginger, and cinnamon.

I'm sitting on my windowsill, and the cool crisp air of fall, air of the season, is lightly blowing in.

It's hardly 2:30, but already the afternoon shadows are long. Trace leaves litter the streets as pedestrians slowly amble down the West Side's characteristic wide sidewalks. The sky is a pure, lightened blue, with one or two faint, wispy clouds added in as an afterthought. The air also carries the faint scent of pine, wafting from the Christmas tree vendors from Canada setting up shop down the block.

Unlike most days in the City, quiet is noticeably more common today, instead of the norm of din. Relatives of strangers arrive, bearing flowers, bags of food, and the occasional headache. For a brief moment in a hectic city, NY license plates are less common.

People are walking slowly, cars are driving slowly.

I'm glad I'm not the only one absorbing the magic of the day.

Manhattanhenge 5.31.09!

Well, I'm back from 42nd street and 2nd. Tonight was Manhattanhenge, the magical day twice a year when the sun sets on the median of the Manhattan cross-streets, illuminating the length of the street with golden light.

Last year, we only had about a dozen people. But check out the turnout this year!

A police car stopped by to see what the commotion was about, and they ended up taking pictures along with everyone else. A lot of people simply showed up because they saw the crowd, and they walked away with a new tidbit of trivia about New York. Hooray!

Here are some pictures by yours truly:





See you all June 11!

Upright Position

I look out the window. The yellow "13R" sign outside has remained in the same position since I last checked. I sigh. It was supposed to be a 6:30 flight. I check my watch. The later 8:30 flight my father and I declined to take left the gate five minutes ago. Oh well. I check my watch again and run a quick mental calculation. It has been 31 hours since my grandfather passed away, two months shy of his ninetieth birthday. The funeral is in Los Angeles in 17 hours, assuming the plane takes off by then. We were on line for taking off when a passenger became seriously ill. Since the evening is a particularly busy time for an international airport, we spent 45 minutes finding and parking at a gate, while the ill passenger was unloaded and the lavatory was disinfected. It's also the week before Passover, so the plane is packed with Orthodox families trying to get to their holiday destinations ahead of the Orthodox families trying to get to their holiday destinations. Normally, the large numbers of young children clamoring for attention would be soothed by the draw of a seat-by-seat personal entertainment system, naturally assuming that the entertainment system was not experiencing technical difficulties. As I sit in my chair, the stewardess is trying for the fifth time to hard reboot the system, leading me to the pleasant discovery that Delta runs Linux. How about that?

Finally, we accelerate down the runway. As the jet engines under the wings increase the relative air speed over the wings, physics kicks in, and the force of the lift from teh wings negates and finally overcomes the weight of the aircraft. We're airborn. As we lift off, I'm treated to a view of a cross-section of the air and weather systems around JFK International Airport. We climb through 1000 feet of low-lying clouds. Outside my window, I watch how the fog distorts as it flows over the streamlined wings and how it forms a compact tail leading off the light on the edge of the wing. The time is now 8:55, and I'm staring out the window into the surprising brightness of the evening shy. Below us is the cloud cover we just passed through, and above us are the great rain clouds, which are only surpassed vertically by wispy cirrus clouds dusting the sky. The fog beneath us has an otherworldly glow to it, brought to you by the light pollution of tens of millions of light bulbs illuminating the Big Apple. Far off on the horizon, a distinctly warmer light is reflecting off of distant clouds basking in the light from their local sunset. Dozens of stars appear above the horizon as crisp points. Among them, another set of dots move, blink, rise, and fall: airplanes. In the daytime, the global network of air traffic remains invisible to those not in a cockpit or a control tower. By night, however, the airplanes' flashing lights reveal an intricate, three-dimensional network. Oh, and after the umpteenth or so hard reboot of the Penguin, the entertainment system is back online.

Peace.

The Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-Day Saints and YOU!

Setting: Near a subway, I'm walking down the street.
Plot: A member of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-Day Saints is trying to convert the masses selling holiday cards.

Her: Hello! Would you like to learn a little bit about Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior?
Me: No thanks, I'm an atheist.
Her: *extremely puzzled, stutters*
Her: Well, um, well, I 've always been curious: why si it that you're an atheist.
Me: I'm an atheist because I look at the universe around me and I do not see the need to invoke the existence of a supernatural deity in order to explain the universe's existence or its phenomena. Furthermore, even if a deity were requried, I see no reason why it should be one deity over any other.
Her: Well, that's, uh, interesting. If you ever want to learn more about Jesus--
Me: I'll stop by. Got it. Thank you.
Her: Er, no problem.

I love New York.