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So I just broke down and joined Facebook.  This is fun...but I really wish there were a better way to meld all this online social-networking, as it's already a time sink, and it's just gonna get worse.  Flickr/LinkedIn/Facebook/Dopplr/The Site Which Must Not Be Named/message boards like Virtual Jeopardy, NYC Photobloggers and NYCAviation/&c/&c, to say nothing of keeping up with friends' blogs (and my own, and my photoblog, and that soon-to-be-launched other blog that I keep annoyingly dropping hints about) seem like way too many demands on my already fragmented-beyond-repair attention.

Maybe if they were all in one big RSS-friendly site, lovingly indexed by Google (and the Department of Homeland Security, no doubt)...

Trivia czar (and my good friend) Tony Hightower, aka Chico Bangs, made an appearance on "Cash Cab" recently.  He made out quite nicely:

(Oh, and that guy that Tony called for the "Mobile Shoutout" seems like a good guy too.)

Some linky goodness for your Friday:

• Britain's Channel Five News leads a crusade against "lazy, cliched and cheating" video editing techniques;
• an interesting USA Today story on specialty paint jobs for airliners.  (Check out the gallery, too.)  I love these; they make the aviation experience more interesting and restore some of the all-but-gone dash and romance to air travel.  (One day, I hope to see Southwest's "Shamu One" chasing Alaska's "Salmon-Thirty-Salmon" down a taxiway.  It'd be like the Discovery Channel at an airport);
• Amy Sedaris on Martha Stewart's show;
• Adam Greenfield looks at Manhattan and wonders "who the hell are these people?";
• Telstar Logistics, purveyors of all things cool, explores a B-29 Superfortress;
• I think that most cops do a very difficult job pretty well for far too little money.  But that doesn't excuse the kind of above-the-law behavior that some cops feel entitled to.  This kind of jerkishness (check out the "Dick of the Month" nominations, where cops bitch about having to take the consequences of their actions) is wrong and unacceptable.  No one -- from the President of the United States to the cop on the beat -- is above the law, and to believe otherwise is to invite tyranny;
• oh, and while we're talking about the police:  Photography is still not a crime.  Even if you're a Muslim;
• Apparently, according to Rush Limbaugh, troops who oppose the war are "phony soldiers";
• Wow.  San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders announces his support of gay marriage (and the changing of his personal thinking on the issue) in a riveting, emotional video.  Kudos to him, and I wish more American politicians would display the courage and compassion that he does here.

YouTube continues to be a wonderland of great musical clips:

• Peter Gabriel (and the voice of the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) with "Signal to Noise";
• Two robots (!) play Gnarls Barkley's hit "Crazy" on improvised percussion and a theremin;
• Darth Vader plays the blues;
• Buddy Rich on The Muppet Show;
• They Might Be Giants (who have their own YouTube account, as "ParticleMen") celebrate Brooklyn;
• and a trio of great Elvis Costello recordings:  his cover of Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful"; a gorgeous acoustic version of "Rocking Horse Road"; and a nicely shaggy cover of Manfred Mann's "Pretty Flamingo" with Nick Lowe, Squeeze's Glenn Tilbrook, and some others.

It's old news (from May), but I just loved the way that Knoxville ridiculed the Klan.

Manhattan.  Perfect., originally uploaded by Vidiot.

Another Manhattan post, but this time it's the drink, not the island.  In a SF Chronicle article, Gary Regan expertly limns the king of cocktails.

If you're wondering, I'll take mine with Rittenhouse rye, Martini & Rossi or Punt E Mes vermouth, and a heavy hand on the Angostura bitters bottle.

Incidentally, stay tuned to this blog for some more news on the cocktail front.  Exciting stuff is afoot.

Going through the backlog of Stuff I Want To Post About:

A couple months ago, I decided -- for the sheer hell of it -- to take a walk on Broadway.  All of Broadway -- or at least the portion on the island of Manhattan, for as you head northward, it turns into Route 9 and goes to within 600 feet of the Canadian border.

It's been done a bunch of times before, but I'd never done it.  So on a brilliantly sunny Saturday, I took the train to the Marble Hill Metro-North station (it's one of NYC's quirks that Marble Hill, though on the mainland, is politically part of Manhattan), walked along the river to the Broadway Bridge, paused to watch the rowers practicing on the Harlem River, then turned right, setting foot on Broadway at 9:46am...

...and six hours and twenty-one minutes later, my hands touched the railing at Battery Park.  (2.19 mph, on average, but that includes a few stops.)  According to GMaps Pedometer, it was 13.86 miles.

Impressions:

• The upper reaches were pretty empty, with only a few fellow pedestrians.  I didn't realize how heavily Latino upper Manhattan is -- I knew there was a sizable Dominican population, but I was impressed at the sheer numbers of signs in Spanish all the way to Harlem.
• I was also surprised at how much of Broadway I'd walked before, in various chunks -- the area from 181st Street down to about 160th, a stretch in the 140s, and pretty much everything below 118th Street.   I was always pleased to note familiar landmarks -- Riverside Church made its appearance at 135th, the Empire State Building at 37th, and the Woolworth Building around Houston.  Even though I'd seen more than half of the walk before, it was a new pleasure to watch the various neighborhoods I'd walked rolling into one another.  It's like when you take the bus versus riding the subway.  Habitual subway use gives you somewhat deep familiarity of the areas around each subway station that you use -- you know how to get to your destinations from that one point.  Riding the bus gives you a greater, big-picture sense of how it all fits together.
• I stopped a few times:  to watch an asshat protester at 59th, to lean on some scaffolding and make a phone call at 54th, to pick up an extra memory card for my camera at Union Square, and to get lunch (and discover, to my chagrin, that I really should have worn sunscreen) at Great Jones Street.
• My mood was better when I could walk unencumbered by crowds walking all over the sidewalk.  It was mall pace from about 53rd to 40th (the pre-matinee hordes), and all through SoHo, which was jammed with trendies.
• I drank five large bottles of water on the trip, and probably could've gone for a few more.
• When I switched from the west side of the street to the east side (just below Union Square), it felt more momentous than it should have.

Oh, and I took pictures.  Lots of them.  One every block, in fact.  (It was such a brilliantly sunny, high-contrast day the pictures didn't come out quite as well as they could have; I was shooting more for documentation than art at any rate.)  I think I might try to make an animation out of some of them at some point.

So:  What's next?  I need to decide.  I could walk the Broadways in Queens and in Brooklyn, to complete the triumvirate.  (I don't believe they have them in Staten Island or the Bronx.)  Or maybe I'll walk from JFK to Manhattan, a la Will Self, or walk all the Manhattan streets, as Caleb Smith and others have done.  Or perhaps something else?  You tell me.

AP:  Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, said he thought the invitation to Ahmadinejad was a mistake "because he comes literally with blood on his hands."

Literally?

Someone get him a Handi-Wipe, will you?

Eternal thanks to Brittney for pointing me toward this page featuring more animated gifs from "America's Next Top Model" than you can possibly imagine.

Now, hear me out here: I don't really care about "ANTM" or Tyra Banks or any of that stuff...but a page full of endlessly looping snarls and sashays just made my day.

Wow, Stephen Fry has a blog.  (And he's a hard-core geek.)

Queens Crap discovered this marvelous clip from a promotional film for the 1964 World's Fair, showcasing Philip Johnson's New York State Pavilion:

Alas, the pavilion is now a derelict, fenced-off ruin, and there seems to be little political will or dollars to halt the slide.

Hey, Gothamist, nice picture!

(thanks!)

We all knew Bill O'Reilly is an asshole.  Because I'm not a regular viewer/listener, though, I didn't realize that Bill O'Reilly is a racist asshole:

You know, I was up in Harlem a few weeks ago, and I actually had dinner with Al Sharpton, who is a very, very interesting guy. And he comes on The Factor a lot, and then I treated him to dinner, because he's made himself available to us, and I felt that I wanted to take him up there. And we went to Sylvia's, a very famous restaurant in Harlem. I had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful. They all watch The Factor. You know, when Sharpton and I walked in, it was like a big commotion and everything, but everybody was very nice.

And I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship. . .

There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, "M-Fer, I want more iced tea". . .

You know, I mean, everybody was -- it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all.

Unbelievable.

So I'm trying out this new web 2.0 service called Jott.com.  It's pretty nifty:  you call a special toll free number, dictate a message after a beep, and they transcribe your ramblings into a text message, a reminder to yourself, or (like here) a blog post. Same ramblings...but now it's going from audio to text. Kinda like hands-free text-messaging. Does it work? I don't know, you tell me. I recorded this blog post that way.

UPDATE:  Edited slightly, for grammar/punctuation/overall readability, and to take out the audio link and add a URL.  So this thing does work, but I'd rather edit things that go up on a public forum like this blog.  Great for text-messaging, though.

Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers better get ready for a smiting:

State Senator Ernie Chambers is suing God.  He says it to prove a point about frivolous lawsuits. . .Chambers' lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in Douglas County Court, seeks a permanent injunction ordering God to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terroristic threats.The lawsuit admits God goes by all sorts of alias, names, titles and designations and it also recognizes the fact that the defendant is “Omnipresent”.

In the lawsuit Chambers says he’s tried to contact God numerous times, “Plaintiff, despite reasonable efforts to effectuate personal service upon Defendant (“Come out, come out, wherever you are”) has been unable to do so.”The suit also requests that the court given the “peculiar circumstances” of this case waive personal service. It says being Omniscient, the plaintiff assumes God will have actual knowledge of the action.

UPDATE:  God responds.

A most enjoyable weekend -- one that makes me really wish it didn't have to end.

On Friday after work, I stopped by a reading/book signing by Martin Langfield, who wrote a thriller set in New York called "The Malice Box."  It apparently relies heavily on New York geography, so I thought it'd be interesting.  Langfield wrote a really interesting guest page last week on Kevin Walsh's Forgotten NY site.  To my surprise and delight, I ran into a colleague and some acquaintances at the reading -- underscoring what a small town New York really can be sometimes.  (Especially because of the people I knew that were there, I knew each of them in different ways, through an entirely different circle.)  Not incidentally, Martin Langfield's wife Amy Langfield writes the excellent New York travel guide and events blog NewYorkology, which is well worth a visit.

I arrived home later on to discover that my new toy telephoto zoom lens had arrived; be on the lookout for even more!  and closer up!  boring pictures of airplanes &c to clutter up this space in the future.

Saturday, I lucked out and scored the last spot on one of the Transit Museum's rare-ish tours of the City Hall station, which has sat abandoned since 1945.  They call this station a "jewel in the crown", an apropos sobriquet given its dark-green-and-cream-colored tiles, its chandeliers, ornate skylights, graceful arches, and Gustavino tile vaulting.  We got to the station by boarding a 6 downtown local train at Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall, which is normally the last stop on the line; the trains loop around through the abandoned City Hall station and wind up on the uptown side back at Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall.  After our tour was done, we caught another 6 train to take us back to Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall, and the motorman invited the kids on the tour to drive the train over the non-revenue track between the two stations.  They were thrilled, understandably, and it was fun just to stand in the cab doorway and take pictures...but the best was yet to come:  after we arrived at Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall, the motorman and the Transit Museum historian invited me into the cab to take as many pictures as I wanted, and we hung out all the way to 125th Street as the historian and motorman swapped war stories.  So very cool.

After going further uptown and spending about 40 fruitless minutes wandering the neighborhood around the George Washington Bridge bus terminal, I finally found the ramp across the West Side Highway at the end of 181st Street.  My destination was the Little Red Lighthouse Festival in Ft. Washington Park, where they were offering semi-rare tours of the titular landmark.  (They're also offering tours this coming Saturday from 1p-3p and during Open House New York.)  It was worth the hour or so wait in order to get to see a place that's normally off-limits; the view's not that much better than it is from forty feet below, but c'mon:  you get to go up in a lighthouse! 

From there, it was down to Grand Central, where I met B. and my friend Patty, and we were off to a screening of 'Across The Universe", the Julie Taymor-directed Beatles musical.  (I stumbled across a shoot for it on the Lower East side back in October '05.)  It was bizarre -- but in a good way.  Surreal, yes -- Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite, for one, and a gaggle of Salma Hayeks for a "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" dream sequence/freakout -- but very well put together indeed.  I thought the editing was superb, and the pacing and picture-sound matching was some of the best work I've seen in this arena since "West Side Story."  Simply put:  we loved it.

Sunday afternoon found me in Brooklyn, on a Forgotten NY walking tour of Atlantic Avenue, followed by a swing past LeNell's, the best liquor store in the city (if not the universe...even if they are presently out of Crème de Violette.)  I then headed down to a party at a friend's place in the Fairway Building in Red Hook -- the apartment was gorgeous, but the rooftop was great, with spectacular 360-degree views and the entirety of New York Harbor spread out before me as the sun sank behind Bayonne.  (Serious real-estate lust ensued, followed by the crushing realization of the realities of my finances.)

So back to the salt mines I go...

(Pictures of all of the above coming hopefully soon to my Flickr page as soon as I power through this massive backlog of unedited images; too bad it's more fun to take pictures than edit them.)

Check out what must be the scariest approach in the world...to Toncontin International Airport (TGU) in Tegucicalpa, Honduras:

Some linky goodness for Friday:

• I greatly enjoyed this article on tribespeople from Vanuatu (who worship Prince Philip as the human incarnation of God!) who visit the UK.  Fish-out-of-water stories never quite lose their appeal, do they? (via Czeltic Girl)
• a helpful guide for Americans visiting Britain;
• Daylight Map is an updated, GMaps-based version of those GeoChron clocks that show what parts of the earth's surface are in daylight;
• taglines for the next Indiana Jones movie;
• Mini-Britney -- smaller and saner!
• via BoingBoing, the A Soviet Poster A Day blog;
• also via BoingBoing, a great safety video about what can go wrong with MRIs; and
• Le Corbusier, bitches!

September 11th tribute songs.  Be very afraid.

Salon's got a really nice essay by Rebecca Traister on Britney Spears' VMA peformance:

Spears is living out our ur-nightmares -- showing up naked at school, or arriving at a test that we didn't know we had while everyone chortles and points and we fail. That is actually what MTV set her up to do on Sunday night and since, as we've passed around the video clip of her lameness.

It didn't stop with laughing. There was also the harsh but deserved criticism of her performance and, more horrendously, of her physique. Spears, it seems, two children and five years of self-abuse later, no longer pleases the public with her hourglass shape. No, her ill-fitting outfit showed off a figure that was not as compact and pink as it was when she was a teenager. Sure, she looked better in a bikini than probably 98 percent of the Americans sitting on their couches and howling at her, but she was no longer porn-star perfect. And in the American lexicon, that equals fat. Wonder why your daughters have eating disorders and hate their bodies? Maybe because they're reading reports that label the thin young woman dancing around in a bra and panties physically unappealing and obese.

But shame on Spears for cheerfully submitting to our expectations once again, after all these years and all the crap she's taken. I'm willing to believe that she was pushed into show business by a striving mom. . .molded into a confusing vamp-virgin and told to sing songs about being hit while wearing a schoolgirl outfit; I'm willing to believe that she was offered no moral structure or opportunity to build a personality of her own; I'm willing to believe that she is a victim of grotesque class expectations that chucked her back in the Cheetos-and-trucker-hats ghetto as swiftly as erotic expectations plucked her from it. But I'm not willing to believe that she was forced by anyone to show up on national television on Sunday night.

Subsequent reports seem to indicate that Spears insisted on wearing that get-up, maybe remembering with Pavlovian conviction that in the past when she'd worn such outfits, she'd received panting approval.

We need more of this kind of sharply-reasoned cultural critique on teh Intarweb.  (via Xoverboard.)

The single best restaurant menu ever conceived by the mind of man.  (via Eye of the Goof.)

This made me laugh:

Hey, check out Smogr, the new urban-focused site from architect/photographer/all around cool guy Randy Plemel (aka the Grubbykid.)

From my Queens rooftop, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

Busy weekend, and a looooong one, when you consider that I had a few days off last week.  (This is why I don't have one of those "calendar view" widgets on my blog, to tell you when I've posted; I'd rather have you do the math, and I'd rather not stare at those empty days, mocking me with their un-lit-up-ness.)  I'd originally considered going out of town, but decided to scratch that, preferring to save money for an upcoming trip.  (The Euro's kicking ass against the dollar now, and I'll need every cent.)

So what did I do?  Played bar trivia (our team won, which is always fun), relaxed at home a lot, wandered around my neighborhood a bunch, moseyed down to JFK to do some planespotting (d0rk!), hung out with friends from in town and outta town, hit the Shake Shack and watched tennis in Madison Square Park, visited good bookstores, covered the entire MoMA in record time,watched (but didn't sing) karaoke at my local,  caught up on sleep, hung out and watched short films with B. upon her return from Connecticut, et cetera, et cetera.

Last night, B. and a friend and I checked out PDT, the speakeasy cocktail joint adjacent to Crif Dogs in the East Village.  (Quality cocktails + deep-fried hot dogs are a surefire winner in my book..)  Yeah, it's full of scenesters, and it's got the gimmicks (which, truth be told, are part of the draw), but PDT mostly delivered.  We had delicious dogs (especially the "Chihuahua Dog" -- a dog encircled by bacon, deep-fried, and served up with an avocado slice and a cream cheese sauce...your basic lipid cluster bomb in a bun) and drinks (I particularly liked my "Solstice", a concoction of (if I remember correctly) Rittenhouse Rye, Dubonnet, Amaro, and some things I'm not remembering now.  If only I'd had my camera!)   

The cocktails aren't quite up to Angel's Share or Pegu Club standards yet:  I ordered a "Silver Lilly" [sic] out of curiosity over its ingredients of Plymouth gin, creme de violette, Cointreau, and lemon juice -- essentially a Blue Moon with Cointreau added -- and then when the drink arrived, I wondered why they added the Cointreau.  I think most of the cocktails in what Gary Regan calls the "French Sour" category (base spirit + liqueur + citrus juice), like the Margarita, Sidecar, Aviation, et cetera, work best when you're not throwing two different liqueurs in the mix.  PDT also failed my standard test of a truly great cocktailian bar when they couldn't produce a Corpse Reviver No. 2 -- the waitress said that "the bartender said he didn't have all the ingredients", which seemed strange since every single ingredient (save pastis, which I'm sure they have) was part of at least one of the house cocktails on the menu.  I'm guessing they didn't know how to make it and wanted to save face, but is it that hard to fess up?  I'd have happily walked them through it.

I don't wanna harsh on PDT here though:  it's very, very good, and greatness is most certainly within its reach.  Wonderful dogs, an inventive drinks menu, fresh ingredients, visual flair (Jim Power did the bathrooms!) add up to a destination that I'm totally gonna revisit.  When I walked in, I noticed not one but five bottles of bitters in the speed rack at the bar, and I took that to be a very good sign indeed.