So, obviously, this is the World Trade Center memorial. It looks like they were set up to handle big crowds, so I'm glad I went at night. Not only were there not many people there, but as you see, it was pretty.

I don't know anyone who died, but I sure enjoyed David Angell's creation, "Cheers".

From our October snowstorm, which reminded me of the freak October '91 snowstorm in Minnesota. The Twins won the World Series, my sister got married, and I had to abandon her car in downtown Minneapolis because it was buried. Our storm wasn't nearly that bad (although a bunch of people lost power for almost a week, there was freezing rain after the snow) but it was a surprise.

"I must be buggin'."
--UPS driver, trying to explain why he'd left a non-delivery notice on my door when I was home. He'd thought the label said #2, but it hadn't. Fortunately, I was so anxious about getting the boxes that I was looking out the window and saw the truck on the street and went down to meet him.

Anyone remember John Leguizamo's excellent sketch comedy show, "House of Buggin'"? The sketch I remember was a gang war between the Crips and the finger-snappng, skat-singing Jets from "West Side Story". Guess who freaked out when Officer Krupke came by?

Ever wonder where the fashionable priest shops?

You always see pigeons in the Staten Island Ferry station. I can't swear they're always the same ones, but you know how adaptable pigeons are. This one was performing his morning ablutions in the drinking fountain.

New favorite free thing in New York--bike riding on Governor's Island. The bike rental place there offers 1 hour free on Fridays, and despite the threatening weather, I went last Friday, as this is the last weekend the island is open. (Why? It should be great in September and October.) There was a Coast Guard station there that's now been combined with Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, and the vibe of the buildings, which you can bike around, is that of some abandoned insane asylum.

The good part of the weather was that apart from a couple of school groups, there weren't many people there. The bike I rode was even easier than the mountain bike I had in Central Park, it was the old school, pedal forward to go forward, back to stop, 2-speed of my childhood.

I circled the island twice and explored some of the buildings in the hour before it really started to unpleasantly rain and I had to return the bike. (The island is a mile long, a quarter mile wide, and 2.2 miles around the perimeter.) The fabulous views include the Statue of Liberty, aka "My Gal", the Brooklyn waterfront, East River bridges, Lower Manhattan, and Upper New York Bay. Because of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, New York is now guarded by canon and geese.

I had so much fun even though at one point I used my shin as a kickstand and you can see the results.

Speaking of so much fun, thanks to Cousin Patty for a great visit. Walks on the High Line and Prospect Park, a gallery show, singing at Marie's, family game nights, and Follies, where I wouldn't have believed it, but Bernadette was blown out of the water by fellow Minnesotan Jan Maxwell!

Mornin'! Was it the rain, the wind or the low pressure that kept me asleep for 10 hours?

It appears to be mostly over--lots of people have lost power and coastal areas and rivers in New Jersey are flooding, but nothing unprecedented. I'm reminding myself you want hurricanes to be an anti-climax.

In my little corner of the world, there's water damage and a lot of wet-looking bricks up near the ceiling right above where I found the pile of brick-dust on earthquake day, so apparently that was non-cosmetic damage. But the bricks absorbed all the leakage, nothing of mine got wet.

Two other bits of good news--my bathtub holds water, and I don't need it for flushing assistance yet.

There doesn't even look like there's anything to take a picture of. You can't photograph subways not running.

TV is back on. NY1 is taking calls from the public, Bianca from Queens wants to know, "Is court going to be open Monday?"

Update from storm central: TV is out; Internet and phone are still on. Peg Bracken's cola chicken has been tasted and is as trailer as you could wish for.

Fun rainy day project: register to vote! I haven't voted since moving to NY (5 years, y'all!), agreeing with Brian Doherty 'I refuse to legitimize which thief robs me'. But I've felt bad a couple of times that I couldn't sign petitions to get my peeps on the ballot, and just cast my vote to frown at the oligarchy.

I'm trying to think of a slogan for a flier for a table I'm working at something called Liberty Fest in a couple of weeks. Current front runner: Third Parties are the New Black. Here's the site:

http://lfnyc.com/

You know when freedom is involved, you're going to see some white guys. I don't know who he is, but that Gary Franchi guy looks pretty dreamy!

Dateline: Brooklyn, storm central. Down towards the canal, there are lots where big tourist buses park, and they made a conga line to higher ground at about 11 o'clock. It reminded me how Ray Nagy did not do the same during Hurricane Katrina, leaving NO's school buses to get flooded, then begged Greyhound to send buses to help evacuate, which it did. Skip a bit . . . and then he was reelected.

Anyway, chicken has been cooked, ham has been pulverized into salad, pudding has been made, hair and person have been washed, and dishes are being washed now. (Not 100% trusting of water/plumbing services tomorrow.) Mom called this morning to ask if I was evacuating. Knowing me, she then said, "Are you supposed to be evacuating?" I'll be fine as long as I have Jonathan Schwartz on the radio for company.

Everyone's comparing this to 9/11, but I'm reminded of Y2K. (Which ironically, Mister Cantor did not get worked up over, despite his motto, "Danger everywhere!". "It was too technical," he said.) I had 56 gallons of water stockpiled in my living room and a trunk full of firewood that was still there when I sold the car the next year. Aww, the car, where are you now, Mister Salty?

New York is canceled this weekend.

I'm glad I'm out of my apartment that flooded all the time, but I'm going to be keeping my eye on the Gowanus canal. Right now it's two blocks away . . .

If you live long enough, you see it all. Last night at a restaurant, I sat next to two elderly women. As they waited for their check, one took out a lipstick, applied it, then passed it to her friend who did the same.

I think I just found some earthquake damage, a pile of orange brick dust along the floorboard in the kitchen. I'm sure I wouldn't have thought anything of it if I'd been here, trucks on 7th Street shake the house all the time.

Mister Cantor, up on the 19th floor, felt his office chair roll around and thought he was getting the dizzies.

Tonight's menu--Peg Bracken's cola chicken. You coat a baking dish with ketchup, layer three pounds of chicken parts (I'll buy a "bag of legs" on the way home from the gym), add a can of coke and voila! Or perhaps more accurately, yee-haw!

I've been doing logic puzzles lately. They occupy their own little universe where kids go on field trips and enter contests, suburbanites plant and paint, and hobbyists go to conventions in costume.

Has everyone noticed how many smurfs there are, relative to the one female? And how is she related to Papa Smurf?

Something old, something new. . .

Congratulations to my cousin Mary and her new husband, Al Peterson. They're a great couple, currently honeymooning in Maine. I didn't get a chance to make my toast at the reception, so here it is: "Naturally we're all here to celebrate the bride and groom, but I'd also like to thank the mathematicians who developed the match.com algorithm who introduced them. Well done, nerds!"

The second shot is Brookdale mall in Brooklyn Center, the entrance I used when I worked at National Uniform Shop, with one of the great old broads who appear in my life whenever I need them, Char Adney. RIP, Char, and B-dale!

Oh, to know the story behind the box on the sidewalk labeled FREE, filled with NutriSystem food!

Bucket List alert: I rented a bike and rode around Central Park today. (Why not my beloved hometown Prospect Park? Because the bike rental industry is not as well developed here. You have to rent for the whole day, for example, rather than by the hour.) It was a gorgeous day and these modern bikes are so easy to ride, it was really fun.

For those of you who pray, I've applied for a job I really, really want to interview for. For those of you who bribe, email me for further information.

My high school friend Jo Lynn Terry would have been 54 today. She was older than I was so I always think of her as being older than me, but she was killed when she was 23, just a baby.

And I just noticed the irony--she was killed riding her bike.

Uncle Sam wants you...to eat Nathan's hot dogs! Yep, I went to the hot dog eating contest, where last year's winners triumphed again, Sonya "The Black Widow" Thomas and Joey "Jaws" Chestnut, but no records were broken. In the ladies' round, one contestant had a tragic attack of hiccups, and one of the male contenders, I think it was Notorious B.O.B., "got disqualified in the most unwatchable way possible". The men had great personas. My fave: Eater X, who woke one morning on a beach in Tangiers with no memory, but obvious training in speed-eating. Now he travels the world, eating, and hoping to solve the mystery of who he is. (For those of you who follow the sport, for the second year in a row, Takeru Kobayashi did not compete because of a contract dispute with the--yep--governing body, Major League Eating.)

But the highlight for me was the emcee, Barney. He had the Old Testament quality I used to like about wrestling, everything was of epic proportion. "God spoke directly to Isaiah," was one, "but he's speaking to Joey Chestnut through hot dogs!" "Her stomach is a cauldron, her jaw is a vice and her teeth are daggers!" "She's attacking those dogs like a starving hyena on the Serengheti!"

I was also testing Equate brand SPF 30 spray-on sunscreen which seems to do the job--I have no Birkenstock lines.

To top it all off, I can see the Macy's fireworks from my window. Happy 4th everybody!

Hilarious show about the cold war from the Russian point of view last night. (Something's wrong with the TV feed at the gym, I went intending to watch "Chopped" but there were only a handful of channels available, just like Sunday.) Whenever there was a big event in the USSR, all the TV stations would broadcast "Swan Lake". One guy remembered a day he woke up hungover to find "Swan Lake" on TV, so he called his friend to ask what was going on. "Look outside!" the friend said, and there were tanks rolling down his street on the way to the White House for the attempted coup of 1991!

Another woman remembers that the lead story on the news was almost always about a record harvest somewhere.

Is crazy, dees modern world, no? I just got back from the gym, where I figured on watching the season finale of "Mob Wives", my current fave reality TV show, on the elliptical. Instead, there happened to be an hour-long interview with John Papola and Russ Roberts, the director and writer of the video I was in. If that weren't enough to keep my attention, in order to talk about the comedians who play Hayek and Keynes as rappers, they froze the very frame showing my big ol' face turned to the left, with the flabby chin stretching back to the right shoulder. Feet, do yo' stuff!

Back now from Minnesota, where the Twin Cities' economy seems to be driven by clinics, colleges and dollar stores. My favorite was a Family Dollar store on Nicollet where for the first time I saw they now have house brand products. My fave was the Family Dollar Pregnancy Test, but they also had house-brand food!

I was with my mom at the Mayo clinic Monday, where the first question everyone asks is where the other person's from. (We arrived Sunday, and let me tell you, there's nothing else to do in Rochester, Minnesota, Lourdes of the Prairie.) At breakfast, we were next to a probably 40 year-old guy and his mother from Iowa. When I admitted I live in New York, the guy said, "New York, huh? Can you believe that French guy? He was French, right, the banker? Can you believe he was paying three thousand dollars a night for a motel room?!"

From coverage of the royal wedding: Kate Middleton's dress is as pretty as any I've ever seen, as pretty as Princess Grace's (does anyone watch "Say Yes to the Dress" where all the brides want to look like Grace Kelly, then come out in a dress with their boobs hanging out?) and my mom's; Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Easter Egg; Kate's sister Phillipa was pretty va-va-voom for an abbey; Diana must be haunting that balcony like an Indian burial ground; the crowd never demands to see Charles and Camilla kiss (will I never stop thinking "tampon" when I see those two?); suspect Sarah Ferguson is going off Weight Watchers today (first the Black Eyed Peas and now this); a lot of places I've barely heard of have 'royalty' and it was making me feel like quite the proud rebellious colonist; and hat making must be a cottage industry that's taught in home ec or something, that it can bloom when needed and then go dormant again.

From my dozing during the royal wedding: I was in the church trying to explain to someone who'd never heard of him why Stephen Sondheim is so important.

Here's the video I'm an extra in:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc

It seems like every seven years or so, the Judds need to assure me they've ironed out problems in their relationship.

An even worse job fair yesterday, at a Holiday Inn in Manhattan. Here's all you need to know about the difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn, though--in Blyn, vendors sold Newport loosies, in Manhattan, they were giving out 5-Hour Energy drinks.

Heard and seen at the Marty Markowitz (Brooklyn borough president) job fair line in which I waited for two hours and fifteen minutes Thursday:

"Them niggaz is strong." This referred to retarded kids, the care of whom was one of the jobs.

"I went to the Javitz Center [job fair] and they didn't hardly have no police there. But this is Brooklyn, they know what to expect." (When I first got there, a cop was breaking up a fight between a young girl and boy who looked like he'd tried to steal her purse. He was walking away with a hat and she was screaming to give it back while the cop was helping her with her stuff, so here I was facing the guy and I just froze, pretty sure I wasn't going to throw down for a hat, but I was blocking him, I guess hoping the cop would tell me he was fine and I should beat it. Finally the kid turned back to give the girl's hat back. Y'all, if I die in NYC, that's how it's going down, me sticking my nose in and in a trick of anatomy, getting my ass handed to me.)

Two men were servicing the line with Newport cigarettes, two for a dollar. (They're $11 for a single pack in NYC, so these were bootleg Virginia ciggies. We have killings now for them.) A man and one of two women he let cut in line with him each bought two. When we got out of the mist under the awning, the woman who bought the smokes offered one to the other girl. "She said she didn't smoke cigarettes," the guy said. To which she made one of the most perfect observations it will ever be my good luck to hear: "One thing I know is girls are situational."

The same guy told a story about the time he took his niece to Coney Island for the day and on the way home in the subway, he was digging for something in his pants pocket and his gun went off. Everyone, including the niece, bolted at the next stop, he transferred to the A, then called his homies to pick him up at his stop. "I ain't blaming [the niece] for getting off the train," he said, "but she ain't even call me later to see am I okay. And I was paying for rides all afternoon."

Fabric softener is the key to masking illicit smoke in the homeless shelter.

Regarding some kind of cash benefit two people had gotten, "Shit, it's not even enough to pay my cable bill." "Me neither. I got a DVR."

It's interesting to see what people consider their job-hunting outfits. I was in line directly behind a guy in a silver leather bomber jacket with a dragon patch that said "Bruce Lee: THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE PHILOSOPHER". He and his friend also let an acquaintance cut in front of me in line.

"A lot of the time it all comes down to who you know, even if you got credentials. And I don't have any credentials."

Which brought us to when my group of ten was the next to go in and some guy waltzed up and tried to blend in with us. Despite the fact that three out of the six people surrounding me had cut earlier, they all threatened grievous bodily harm until he sulked off. I don't know how good an impression he would have made on potential employers anyway--he was sucking on a pacifier. Not the kind that's candy and looks like a ring, the kind that has a perforated plastic guard to keep baby from swallowing it.

And the stats are in, despite feeling financial pressure, I saw 26 plays last year. The average ticket price is only $10.36, though, because almost all were as a seat-filler.

71% of my income went to medical and dental expenses.

Now, back to the taxes!

Read two iconic books this week, Play it as it Lays, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The latter is short and fast-paced, but so dense with ideas I can't claim to understand it well. (Need to see "Blade Runner" again, inherently, let's not say dumbed-down, but re-presented for a mass audience.)

And guess who would never need to turn her mood organ, the machine people use to experience and schedule variations in their emotional lives to 888, "the desire to watch TV no matter what's on"?

One thing I've noticed from the short stories and now two novels of PKD's I've read, though--the purpose of wives is to get men to leave the house!

One of the pleasures of reading sci-fi (or syfy as the Science Fiction Channel would have it) is what the author didn't think would change, and PKD apparently never envisioned a world not heavily reliant on switchboard operators.

I cashed in some airline miles that were going to expire on Entertainment Weekly, but when I looked at the address label yesterday, well, I can't bear the thought that it's going to arrive every week until 2016! (Heck, I can't even bear looking at that number.) I'm going to find someone who wants it.

From The Age of Religious Wars, 1559-1715: "At noon, after hours of ceremonial cannonading, martial music, and religious services, the slaughter began."

Here are Mister Cantor and me on our second Valentine's Day. I succeeded in making the Little Fried Potatoes he enjoyed as a kid in his present--a deep fat fryer. It'll live at my house so he lives a little longer! (And so I can see if I can make fried zucchini at home.) Other menu items: the cookies you see in the bag, which are a recipe of Peg Bracken's, but sugar-free, Sue Spicer's garlic soup, terriyaki spare ribs and roasted root vegetables. Fit for the king he is. And the king I is.

A gwate big vase of flowers shares the apartment with me now.

Life is a circle of life: Mike Judge is doing new eps of "Beavis and Butt-Head" for MTV!

Happy V-Day, my second with Mister Cantor. I'd tell you what's in store, but he might be peeking in and I don't want to spoil his surprises.

Know how I've complained before that in Brooklyn, the wind seems to come from every direction at the same time? You're walking down a street, leaning into the wind, you turn a corner, and bam, get wind full in the face from the new direction? Well, here's some evidence to back me up. These are pictures of snow blown up against my windows. One set faces north, the other south, so you tell me.

Finally, someone who challenges me on The Free Agent blog. Here's his response to what I think is one of my best, "Hooray for Rich People!":

Janet, you are so full of sh*t it’s not even cool. You strike me as a groupie, a bubble gum chewing, pop culture fanatic, easily star struck, paris hilton wanna be air hear.

Back when I was a Rhetoric & Public Address major, we learned this is the logical fallacy, argumentum ad hominem. He attacks who he perceives me to be, but not what I said. And his vision of me--perfect! If I had a webcam on my computer, I'd worry that he was hacking in somehow!

This morning on Regis & Kelly, they announced tomorrow's guest, George Stepanopoulos. "Am I the only one who never noticed there's no f sound in his name before?" I asked the couch. Oh no, the show had it wrong!