nyc
Sometimes, I do
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and think of you.
One difference between the Paris Métro and the subway in New York City is that the doors of the métro do not automatically open. On the older cars, there is a little latch that you have to flip to get the door to open, and on the newer cars there is a button you press. This probably saves some energy, and certainly when it’s colder out this means the cars can stay warmer, because if no one needs to get off a stop, then the doors remain closed. Another difference is that the release to allow the doors to be opened is triggered at some point well before the train actually comes to a complete stop. This means that if you flip the handle early, you can jump off a train that is still-moving (although not very quickly). I like to think I can pick out real Parisians as they are the ones that open the door with an insouciant flick of the wrist, and then spring off the slowing car, landing neatly on the platform with nary a feather ruffled.
Read MoreI’m changing things around behind the scenes, so hopefully I’ll start providing more “content” here soon, and hopefully the impending visual alterations will be welcome.
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Read MoreI’m giving a talk tomorrow (info/abstract below the fold) which required me to find an image of Boris Badenov (don’t ask — it’s to illustrate an example slide). I went to his wikipedia entry, and found, to my delight, that someone has taken the time to create a long list of disguises that Boris has used, along with the episode in which that disguise appeared. Some of my favorites:
- Mayor Avaricious J. Wardheeler (Bumbling Brothers Circus)
- Salesman of Dancer, Prancer, Blitzen, & Fink advertising agency (Moosylvania Saved)
- Hailfellow J. Backslap, Official Washington Greeter (Missouri Mish Mash)
I just watched Klute last night. Great cinematography. It brought back memories of NYC from when I was small, and you had to wear your purse across your body for fear of “snatchers” and Times Square was seedy and dangerous and there was still great art on the subways. Anyway, two things: Jane Fonda had the “one mullet to rule them all” and Donald Sutherland used to look a lot like Tobey Maguire.
A friend of mine works at a wine shop in Chelsea called “Appellation” which carries mostly organic and biodynamic wine. Because I’m frequently in the area, I often drop in to see her and pick up a bottle. I end up getting whatever she recommends because I trust her taste, and it gets me to try things I might not otherwise. A few days ago she told me she wanted me to try something which it turns out I’ve never had before: sparkling red wine! It’s called Solo Reggiano and it’s from the Medici Ermete winery in Italy. Apparently the winemaker himself is from that Medici family, and had been in the shop earlier to show them his stuff. I asked if he had been wearing a codpiece and tights — sadly he hadn’t. But the wine was nice, strange, but fun to try. She told me to chill it and serve it with anything. We had it with a broccoli rabe orecchiette dish, but I could imagine it with a wide variety of things, actually.
Read MoreI was listening to NPR as I drove to New Brunswick the other day (I know, so typical!) and I heard about Eliot Spitzer’s plans for his inaguration. The ceremony is scheduled to take place at noon on January 1, after a more official midnight swearing-in. The event is open to the public, but it will be held behind the state capitol, which is to say, outdoors. Governor-elect Spitzer wryly noted that the Old Farmer’s Almanac predicts that the temperature will be “nearly negative 15” on that day.
I started thinking about the ambiguity of that phrase, how nearly with positive numbers seems to scope downward: “nearly five” could be four, but not six. So does “nearly negative 15” also scope downward? Or does the inclusion of a negative invert the scope direction? If it’s -14 degrees, is it “nearly negative 15”? Putting aside for the moment the question of whether nearly patterns like most in that, say, five entails nearly five, it appears that pragmatics forces an interpretation of scopal direction away from some “normal” (gleaned from world knowledge) so that the negative number isn’t in play so much as the direction of the divergence from what’s expected. On August 15th I could say “it was freezing today — it was nearly 50 degrees!” and that would be felicitous if the high that day was 53.
Returning to the question mentioned above, I am of the opinion that our intuitions on this come from a pragmatic rather than semantic place, although I can’t imagine that anything I could say on the topic of near would ever top what the kid in the green and white striped shirt says in this clip:
[QUICKTIME http://www.tractorfeed.com/strictlyspeaking/sounds/near.mov 320 257 false true]
“It isn’t even near it — it’s touching the box!”
Read MoreI have a subscription to the New Yorker, and as I can never keep up with the relentless weekly onslaught of issues, I often stuff an unread one in my bag when I know I’m going to be standing on a train. Yesterday I was in the subway reading Anthony Lane’s review of the latest Bond film, which is excellent. Attach that clause high: I mean that the review is excellent. About one of the chases which inevitably must appear in a Bond film, Lane writes that it “goes on far longer than expected, like a theological discussion in a Bergman film, with both the fleeing baddie and the pursuant Bond careening off walls and cranes and anything else that juts into their path.” So great, that sentence. I’m fairly certain now that I don’t ever need to see this film; the review was enough. This is cinema not literature, still I felt like the Tom Townsend character in the eminently quotable film Metropolitan: “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism.”
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