Sandy isn't Funny Any More

I took the bus to work Wednesday without too much trouble.  It took an hour and a quarter, versus 45 minutes it takes by subway.

It took me three and a half hours to get home, though.  I had to pace around Bay Ridge for 55 minutes before finding a bus that wasn't already jammed with passengers.  Then we got to Green-Wood cemetery ("New York's Buried Treasure").  I was listening to music and doing puzzles, so I didn't notice for a while that in ten minutes, we'd only advanced a couple of tombstones.  The driver let some people off right there, in the middle of the block, and I realized we were gridlocked, so I got out and walked the last two miles home.

A woman in the office across the hall from mine lost her house.  Another staff member has a house in Coney Island that's uninhabitable, but she said, "I have to go there, they're looting."  "Not that there's much she can do about that," someone else said.  The effective solution seemed obvious to me, but like during Katrina, if you defend your property with a gun, you're the criminal.

On the bright side, the construction lights on the Freedom Tower are back on. 

Oh Sandy, bay-bee

I'm snuggled in just fine to ride out the storm, still have power and plenty of chow.  Last night, though, it was weird to look out my window at lower Manhattan and not see anything because they had to cut power.  Like it had disappeared. 

Here's me with a 'don't tread on NY' tattoo.

Six years ago today I signed the lease on my first New York apartment.  My friend Andy and I will celebrate tonight, as we always do, with a burrito at Blockhead's.  Then, since it's 20at20 time, we're going to check out a play whose plot seems to come suspiciously near to our  movie script.

At Coney Island, the terminus of several subway lines, MTA workers and pigeons get on the cars to clean out food left under the seats.  The birds haven't figured out the signals that the train is about to leave, though--more than once I've seen them ride to the aquarium, then fly just over the heads of startled people waiting to board.

Politically incorrect thought of the day: Why do so many lesbians look like lesbians?

I tried to leave a comment on IMDB yesterday, but they make it complicated and I have yet to receive the PIN supposedly sent to my phone.

I was going to comment on the upcoming Katherine Heigl movie "The Big Wedding".  Didn't anyone in the years (okay, perhaps months) it took to produce this movie ever suggest that it's a bad idea to name a romantic comedy (assuming) after al Qaeda's code name for the attack on the World Trade Center?  They changed Ben Stiller's new movie "Neighborhood Watch" to "The Watch" after the Zimmerman shooting, there's still time to rename this one.  It's not as if the title is so catchy.  'The Biggest Wedding', 'The Ginormous Wedding', 'Could This Wedding Get Any Bigger?' all capture the same subtle idea, I think.

My director just proposed to my cabaret star.  Whom does one congratulate and to whom does one say 'best wishes', Miss  Manners?  Oh well, mazel tov to both you guys!

I learned a new word the other day, bourse.  You know, I don't ever remember adding a new word to my vocabulary based on studying vocabulary lists in school, but it must happen that way.  Anyway, I was reading Barron's and feeling grateful that I got my MBA back when I was young and could still learn things, when I came up against bourse (a European stock exchange) and would have thought it was a typo, but there's nothing it could be a typo of, except, of course, another word I don't know.

Oh snap!, I just remembered a word I started using because it was on a vocabulary test in 7th grade--hilt.  I completely guessed that it was the handle of a sword, but the 'correct' answer is that it is the maximum extent of something.  My then-bestie, Debbie Howe, pointed out to the teacher both definitions are correct and got me the point.  So really, I added two words to my vocabulary that magical day.

My body mass index is now below 30, meaning I'm no longer obese, just overweight.  Or as I think of it, just plain old American!

My title for a book on ventriloquism: Dummies for Dummies.

Is this the lede of all time?:

Despite surveillance video, eyewitness statements, and a victim clinging for life with more than 75 percent of his face chewed off, the family and girlfriend of Rudy Eugene are telling the world there is no way he could attack someone so viciously.
"I knew my son," Eugene's mother told ABC affiliate WPLG. "Rudy will never, never do something like that. Somebody killed him, and they just go and dump him."

That's a loyal mom!

Here's my resume in a word  cloud.  The website is wordle.net and you can paste or link to any text you want: