I'm not sure if the following belongs here, but I don't know where else to post it.

Long time New Yorkers know that in the "old" days the family buses up to Attica departed from in front of the New York Collesium. Well, then come the building's demolition and the erection of the Time Warner Center. We walked uptown last night and as we came to Columbus Circle Blovie started to wonder what happened to those buses. Sure enough they're back. The juxtaposition of those buses in front of a building that holds 8-figure apartments, 4-figure hotel rooms and two of NY's 4-star restaurants is odd.

Sounds perfect to me. After all, aren't all those establishments thieving, each in its own way?

Went for my annual gynecologist visit this morning. Exam took all of about 5 minutes. Then me and the doc (who is a woman) spent 15 minutes talking about cars.

So, we've been getting a lot of spam here recently while the IT department is tweaking the filters or whatever their excuse is.

Header on spam message touting an online dating site: 'Add considerable flavouring to your liveliness.'

Much more spam here since new filter system was installed. I read the titles every morning as a sort of slightly risque haiku.

Overheard yesterday in Penn Station a guy telling his girlfriend:

"You gotta understand baby, I'm a playa. That means I fuck a lot of women."

Standing in a dry cleaner, next to a pile of shirts in boxes awaiting pick-up. Customer to me: "Shirts in boxes. Did you ever see that before?" Er, yes. "Gee, how does that work?"

He wasn't from around here. Galaxy-wise.

Last week, a friend of mine was telling me about a show she'd seen – an Orthodox Jewish reggae performer named “Modest Yahoo” (I pressed her to spell it for me). Turns out she's talking about a guy named Matisyahu (as I discovered listening to an NPR podcast).

A friend who is travelling to India for work was trying to explain where he was going, and with my very limited knowledge of Indian geography I couldn't figure it out. Finally he put it in terms I could understand: "It's where Dosas come from." That made it perfectly clear.

Headlines in The Guardian Weekly about Liberal Democrat MP, Mark Oaten:

"Oaten offers wholesome fare to voters"
January 20

"Slump in support as [Oaten] resigns over sex scandal"
January 27

I have a nasty feeling I'm repeating myself here, but my gym is Virgin and full of irritatingly smug/cheeky signs in the company style; the problem being that whoever put them together had fairly bad grammar. Thus: "The people using the equipment after you hope you'll wipe them down."

I have just been informed by my father that he's begun stockpiling tamiflu and pedialite on my behalf.

A sign at the nearby $1 store:

If you steal you will be charge (sic):

$20 for $1 that you steal
$40 for $2 that you steal
$60 for $3 that you steal
$80 for $4 that you steal
$100 for $5 that you steal
$200 for $10 that you steal

Please stop stealing!

i take it they encourage stealing?

Something surreal happened at work tonight.

A dude comes in--a normal-looking dude for this restaurant (read: a hipster), and he ambles up to me at the bar. Smiles. All signs point to Normal, so far.

But then he says: "Uh, is this a Walgreen's?"

I, of course, assume he is making some sort of hipster joke, and so I start laughing.

He just looks at me ("boggles at me" might be a better phrase), and says:

"So . . . this isn't Walgreens?"

At this point, I was not sure what to do, so I pointed out that no, this was not now and had never been a Walgreen's, but there was a Walgreen's a few blocks away. He just stared at me--I'm talking utter disbelief here--with his mouth hanging open, very slightly. Then he says:

"Uh . . . are you sure?"

I wanted to direct his attention to the restaurant that we were clearly standing in, you know, the restaurant with muted lighting and strange decor and no pharmacy and a big statue of a monkey with a giant penis mounted to the wall (I'm pretty sure they don't have those at Walgreen's), but instead, I just said "yes, I'm sure," and stared at him until he became as uncomfortable as I was.

He looked confused for a moment more and then he left.

I should have asked him for whatever it was he was smoking before he came in.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/fashion/...les/02tags.html

There is a bunch of birds singing outside my kitchen window. Sounds like springtime kind of bird singing. This weather is bizarro.

yvonne has a 650x822 pixel, 99k avatar that gets squished into the 100x100 pixel max everytime her profile info loads on a page.

A Metropolitan Diary moment: On the subway yesterday, I fell into conversation with a woman who was knitting lace. As we traded yarn/technique resources, she pulled out a notebook to write down a web address I'd mentioned, then flipped to another page and said, "Here's something I can't wait to try. I admired the scarf of someone I met in a yarn store, and she wrote the pattern down for me."

The "someone" was my friend Nancy, who had promised me the pattern when I commented on her scarf at dinner last week.

In creating a training manual for a new Jaguar model about to be released, I'm having to decipher and translate bits of the Owner's Manual, which – although I've been assured it was written by a native English speaker – appears to have been translated from Chinese as written by someone with ADHD. I come across a few howlers every day. Some are egregious violations of grammar, syntax, and organizaiton. Some are just benignly hilarious. Like this one from a section on selecting temperature controls:

“!WARNING: Pressing the driver's buttons...”

Never a good idea.

This cannot be a real product, right?

I'd get one for my husband, but the cats would kill it.

My niece's dog killed her Furby. The dog was jealous of it, we think.

good morning!

Oops. My bad.

and she's indian.

damn. I should have taken that product design class...

Someone on eBay selling "beautiful and tasteful" dinner napkins thinks that "linen" is 60% cotton and 40% polyester. (That's not as surreal as the person selling 800 paper "dinner napkins," though.)

Does eBay let you report fraudulent advertising?

A couple of days ago, NPR reporter Libby Lewis interviewed government criminal Lewis Libby.

Top 10 restaurants @ opentable:

1. Tao
2. Artisanal
3. Ruth's Chris Steak House
4. China Grill
5. Brasserie
6. Tribeca Grill
7. One if by Land, Two if by Sea
8. Tabla
9. Asia de Cuba - New York
10. Django

Louie was photographed by Chinese tourists and Muslim protestors within 200 feet and five minutes of each other yesterday.

and what is his porn name?

Halle Berry, Bruce Willis and Giovani Ribisi are currently shooting a movie in Manhattan called Perfect Stranger. They were shooting on my block of West 10th st. last night.

A production assistant told me the movie, a thriller, was pretty bad.

Among my Amazon Recs are

Renaissance Madrigals and Ywengie Malmsteen