Intermission

Part two of my Monday adventure will be posted soon, but I wanted to send a quick hello your way to let you know I haven't forgotten you. Plenty of work, but no lost love for my readers!

Here's a dog that really knows how to pose for the camera to tide you over.

Half-day adventure (part one)

Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, and a morning host at WABC was filling in for Sean today. As he has his own staff, there was minimal work for me to busy myself with. A side note this early on may be uncouth, but if you'd care for an interesting bio on Mr. Sliwa, you can read it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Sliwa

With half a day suddenly in my hands, I decided to go on a photo journey for my blog friends.

*psst!* That's you!

I dressed for walking, and took the NQRW subway line down to Canal Street. My goal for the first part of this trip was Chinatown, and Little Italy. I walked with dorm friends to both sections of town about 3 weeks ago, but I was sans camera that Sunday afternoon.

Here's a map showing my path, via subway, to Canal Street.

The blue on this map shows my "on-foot" path through Chinatown and Little Italy. The blue "X" at the end of the path shows where I took the train uptown, but there's more of that story to come.

First of all, you know you're in a different part of town when you exit the subway, and see a McDonalds with Chinese characters.


Now we're definitely in Chinatown. This section of town used to very much be Little Italy, but as the presence of Italians in the section of town waned, the presence of Chinese, Taiwanese, and some Koreans grew. The area also just screams black market. Bootleg DVDs of movies out in theaters, knock-off (or stolen) designer purses, and basically whatever goods the mob most recently came across are on-sale for cheap in Chinatown.


There are also a lot of very fresh seafood markets in Chinatown. Live crabs squirm around in tupperware bins, and a man with metal tongs and rubber gloves recaptures them if they start to scramble their way down the street. Squid, giant shrimp, and more fish than I can name fill open-air stores, filling the air with tasty wafts of rotting sea life.





A store declaring itself to be an "Asian Mall" lured me in, and subsequentially disappointed me. Basically, the place had traditional medicines and souvenir garbage. A big plastic case of roots, and a box full of mushrooms were things I don't see every day, though.



On to Little Italy. Almost completely surrounded by Chinatown, Little Itally is basically a row of restaurants, cafes, and churches. I tried to wander outside this row of Little Italy to find a more "authentic" scene, but nothing emerged. I either found some run-down school, or started seeing signs with Chinese characters again. Having not eaten in Littly Italy since 2001, I can't say first-hand, but rumor has it that the best Italian food in NYC is no longer found in Little Italy.

Speaking of Italy, car alert. A Ferrari drove by me in Chinatown, and I snapped a quick couple of pictures. I'm less familiar with the Ferrari line, but I'm pretty sure we're looking at a F430. Someone please e-mail me if I'm wrong.


Okay. This concludes part one of my half day adventure. When I get another free hour to blog, I'll give an account of the second part of my day's journey. From here, I took the A/C/E line uptown to my second destination.

More soon!

Word Play

Tonight, I walked with a group of friends to the West Village to see Word Play, a documentary about the crossword championship held in Stanford, Connecticut each year. When I heard that the group planned on going to see the film about crosswords, I said "No, thanks." These "documentaries" seem sketchy, at best. In Supersize Me, Morgan Spurlock enlightened us to the fact that eating nothing but McDonalds and not exercising makes you fat.

Brilliant. Thanks, Morgan.

Sometimes I think we're going to see a documentary about alcohol. It'll go something like this:

*image of document on screen zooms into some old Xeroxed line*
Narrator: As you can see here from this 1993 document, the Anheiser-Busch company admits knowing that drinking several beers in quick succession will impair your judgement.

Then we'll see some bizarre, preachy message about how the government and the people should crack down on reckless businesses, who retain super-secret information, like alcohol making you drunk, or McDonals making you fat.

In the ilk of Michael Moore, it just seems to me that the "documentary" is the idiot's way of advancing an agenda. It feels like church for Noam Chomsky.

With this in mind, I've rolled my eyes, and stayed away from the documentaries. However, with prodding from friends, and the realization that there couldn't possibly be anything political about crosswords, I agreed to go. However, I still didn't plan on enjoying it.

It's almost as if two film makers made a bet at a bar one night...

Guy 1: Hhheeyy guy, I betchyou can't make a mmmoovie about crossword puzzles!

Guy 2: Ohhyeah? Ohhhhyeah? I bet you I can!

Thus, we end up with a movie about crossword puzzles. However, finding myself with nothing else to do on a Sunday night, I wandered a few avenues west, and we sat down to watch the movie.

Will Shortz is the crossword editor for the New York Times, and he's something of the star of the show. A graduate of Indiana, where you can pick your own major if you like, he majored in... puzzles. Nope, I'm not joking. There was some latinized version of the word for "studies puzzles", but even if I DID remember it, I wouildn't justify it through repetition.

I'll be honest and admit that I did enjoy the movie, but not for conventional reasons. Halfway through the movie, I realized that I wasn't actually into the subject matter. Rather, I was just laughing with everyone else at the kind of person who actually becomes a crossword puzzle elite.

A Hewlett-Packard employee from Fort Collins was featured in the movie, and he's famously taken 3rd place multiple times. At one point in the movie, he realizes a mistake he's made, and slams his headphones to the ground in disgust. Sure you just messed up a crossword championship... but buddy... it's a crossword tournament.

Another lady who lives uptown near Columbia University quite simply epitomized the word "nerd". She won the tournament once, and that was basically all that could be said about the poor lady. She was shown walking around NYC with a badly broken umbrella, and twice during the movie displayed her "talents" as a baton-twirler.

Still another contestant was this 20 year-old kid from some tech institute. He had the personality of sandpaper, and most certainly is a real blast at parties. He wore the same t-shirt throughout 90% of the movie, and did crossword puzzles with as much good humor as a prodded wolverine.

Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Jon Stewart were throwin into the mix, because apparently they like crossword puzzles. Jon Stewart couldn't even make decent jokes up about so bland a topic. It was uncomfortable to watch. Yep, this is the stuff of documentaries, and what happens when bar-guy #2 says "Oh yeah, I bet you I CAN make that movie."

End movie.


I enjoyed the movie... but come ON, people.

Let's toss in an exploding car.