In a surreal tragedy, my grandmother hired a helper last year when she stopped driving - to drive her where she wants to go and to cook some of her meals etc. Her helped Linda is from the Phillipines and brought her son and daughter to the US when she immigrated recently.

Last week, Linda's daughter Kristine was waiting in line at a Church's Chicken fast food outlet when a stray bullet hit her and killed her. She was only 21 years old. Apparently the bullet was shot from 3 blocks away and was not aimed at her. The police were quoted as saying "wrong place, wrong time."

What made it worse was that Linda only found out about the murder when her friend saw the news the following morning on our local ABC affiliate and called her to tell her about it.

Aaron, that's...

Speaking of cafes, now that the downtown Downtown-Uptown on Avenue B has closed, but the uptown Downtown-Uptown on the UES is still open, maybe the uptown Downtown-Uptown should call itself Uptown-Uptown. Except, if they open a new downtown Downtown-Uptown, it would probably have to be called Downtown-Downtown. A midtown branch would increase the options.

My fingers are sore now.

Aaron, how horrible. What a waste.

Fly

My amusing cafe post is unhappily juxtaposed with Aaron's story. Unintentional.

I came out of my apartment yesterday morning to find dark, brick red spots going up the stairs and down the halls. It looked too thick to be blood and it was the same color as the banister, so I figured maybe they were painting. In the hall in front of the mailboxes there was quite a bit of splattered "paint". When I came home from work, the banister had not been painted and 2 different people stopped me in the hall to ask me what I thought about the dried blood, so I got a little concerned. I tried wiping some up with a moist towel, figuring if it was paint it wouldn't come up. Definitely NOT paint. So I leave a message for my landlady. This morning the super had cleaned up the blood and my landlady didn't know anything about it. My roommate said she was woken up late Sunday by what sounded like a group of drunk guys stumbling around, and one yelling "it hurts, it hurts," but she said it didn't sound serious, just drunk. What do I do? My landlady was not going to do anything but I asked her to call the tenents to make sure everyone was accounted for. She obviously thought I was being ridiculous. I don't think there was a murder, or anything and I'm not concerned for my own safety. I'm mostly concerned that some guy cut himself and was so drunk that he didn't realize how badly he was hurt. Then went up stairs and got into bed and never woke up.

I'm a little shocked that nobody seems overly concerned about this- not the landlady, nor the super who cleaned the blood without comment, nor the other tenants.

It cannot hurt to call the police.

Yes. We had lashings of blood on the sidewalk outside our building a few weeks back. I watched the local news eagerly, but learned nothing. Word on the street is that it was a knife attack, but I guess not a fatal one, or it would have made NY1.

I stopped by the precinct and a very nice officer listened to my tale, took the address, and said they would check it out, but that there's nothing they can really do short of someone witnessing or hearing a crime, a call from the family, or my landlady asking them to get involved. He did say that if someone had died we should smell it by now. No smell, so I guess that's a plus.

I now feel like I have done everything a good citizen should reasonably be expected to do, and if something bad did happen I will not feel any guilt over woulda shoulda coulda. In the end, it's really all about me.

see, the Reiki is working already.

this was my fear- in NY (and in my building) there are a lot of students, free-lancers, "novelists" etc who nobody would think to miss. Anyway, now it's an issue of getting my landlord to clean up the bloodstains in the halls and stairs which have been there for 3 days.

"Poets" too. Not to mention "singer-songwriters" of the open mic variety.

Meanwhile, I am struggling with a sign I saw this morning: "Service guaranteed - if possible."

Someone Googled "mouthfulsfood" and "cheerful" and "egullet" and landed on my blog. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.

Fifty years ago pizzas were not delivered to our homes, but milk was.

I don't know why that troubles me? I don'y drink milk.

SB (it just troubles, not annoys me)

Out for dinner with a friend last night. Waitress is describing specials, one of which is “Count Neck Clams in a Red Tide Curry Broth”.

I sort of giggled and said I thought that was pretty funny, but did they really think all their patrons would “get it”. She gave me sort of a quizzical look and blinked a few times, & that's when it hit me that she'd actually said “Count Neck Clams in a Red Thai Curry Broth”.

They were delicious, regardless.

What with Mongo's pink nipple flashing avatar subliminally influencing all his posts lately, my eyes are starting to play tricks on me. I can't tell you what I thought the horse's eye on Malarkey's avatar is, but it was quite a shock. The rest of you aren't off the hook, either, but that's the only one I can mention right now.

At the hair salon....Robin Leach in the next chair for hair color, cut and....eyebrow trim .

Spotted side-by-side in the NY Times Obits: the voices of both Piglet and Tigger have passed.

My "personal banker" at the Bank of New York is named Yvonne Johnson.

Thank you, mongo. I didn't learn what I thought I was going to, though. I thought it was a course related to the cosmos, and I anticipated that the lead teacher would be Galileo, himself.

There you go, confusing astronomy with astrology again.

I thought cosmetology was the study of lipstick

Trafalgar is being commemorated by a reinaction of the battle between the perfidious red team and the snail eating surrender monkey blue team.

Boom!

Could have blown me over with a feather yesterday when I caught part of Lou Dobbs show on CNN showing a clip of Bill and Hillary as guests at the recent Billy Graham revival in NYC. And if that wasn't surreal enough, it then showed Billy Graham on stage telling Bill he would make a good evangelist while Hillary is running the country! You should have seen their faces.

You think the authors get paid?