Leetle, Teeny Alan Greenspan

Oh, poor Alan Greenspan. Not only is he out of a job, but he’s also apparently shrunk.

I clicked on Google News, and the photo they had up to accompany the cycle of Greenspan stories had this photo, apparently from the Portland Business Journal: teeny, tiny Alan Greenspan, hello!

Flinging Midget Widgets

The only thing on my mind to blog about lately is Jack Russell terrier racing (see above).

There is a show somewhere on cable occasionally that has all sorts of dog races and dog obstacle courses. But, by far, of the diving labradors and frisbee-catching mutts, the most entertaining competition is the Jack Russell terrier race.

These little dogs (see above) wiggy-wiggy like (ahem) mad dogs through a ramp-laden obstacle course.

Occasionally, one little smiggy decides he's just going to go around...you know, avoid the annoying things to jump over and through. Anyway, the seven or eight or however many little widgets fly their way across a course only to find themselves running at high-speed toward a hole in a wall sized for a mouse. (The hole, not the wall.)

As they slam through it one by one at around 37 mph (which is very, very fast, if you're the size of a midget dog), one little doggy, nearly every single time, misses the rat-sized hole and sproings his muzzled face into the wall.

There is nothing funnier on television, I promise you.

West 4th Stop of...?

I’m on the A this afternoon, traveling from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Across from me is a mother, large-sized, African-American, maybe 30, hair in heavy braids pulled coiled beside each ear like ram’s horns. Flattering, really. She’s with her friend, who looks a bit young, maybe 18 (soft in complexion), and a small boy, maybe 5 or 6 years old who is smooshed between the two.

The boy is: cute. Cute in the way that little boys who have indulgent mothers know they’re cute. And the mother is the kind of mother who is loud in her banter with the child, in the way that a mother who is a good mother can be, but mostly when they want to make sure that everyone can see what a good mother they are and how great their little kid is turning out. Fair play. This was a good kid.

“I don’t like Manhattan!” the little boy shouts. His eyes glitter and his teeth show when he smiles.

“We’re IN Manhattan right now!” the mother laughs to him.

“I like Manhattan,” the boy then said, smiling at me with each exlamation.

“You like Manhattan now?” mom said.

“I like Manhattan,” the boy said, smiling coyly at me. “I want to say, ‘Hi!’ to Manhattan!”

“Okay, you can say ‘Hi’ to Manhattan at the next stop,” mom said.

“Oh, not the NEXT stop,” said the woman with the mother and her boy. “Heh heh, you know, none of that there…” she laughed knowingly.

The next stop was West 4th.

“Oh, yeah! You can say ‘Hi!’ at the stop after that,” mom says to child.

And I look down at my boring book, done with the exchange, wondering what the hell happened to these women at the West 4th stop, not entirely pleased with the scenarios I am imagining.

Self-Amusing, In an Amusing Sort of Way

The office is fascinating me tonight.

First, I find out that one of my colleagues won $16,000 on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” last year. She then says one of her “lifelines” was her fiancé—not the guy she’s married to this year, though.

Then things keep beeping.

Of course, there’s also the bizarre run-in I had earlier with a columnist who foisted his cell phone number on me unexpectedly. Flattering, although bizarre, considering. Considering the way he did it, the way people were watching, the way he really foisted it, even when I tried to avoid it.

Mostly, I’m just incredibly irritated at the reporter I’m sitting next to tonight (who is a young curmudgeon, truly), although utterly amused by the beeping, enough to laugh maniacally often enough that a nearby designer thinks I’m mad.

That’s fine.

Anyway, I thought I’d share with you this posting on Craig’s List, merrily pointed out by Gawker:

“Whoever found my Rite-Aid bag that I left on the 6 is probably having a wonderful time with my Adderol prescription and box of condoms.

My guy is pissed because he's convinced that I used these condoms with someone else. I can't even pay attention long enough to explain to him that I left them on the train.

He can't get laid now. I can't take my medication, and I can't even get more because Adderol is considered a controlled substance, so I have to wait 30 days."

Welcome to New York, where sometimes things are free, and people are dumb enough to carry around bags of condoms and Adderol, leave them on the train, then post the whole situation to Craig’s List.

And wow, someone just created an explosive noise loud enough to cause everyone’s heads to pop up over the cubicles like little editor-gophers. I think the noise was created by a cleaning woman who dropped or banged a large, empty receptacle. Loud and thunderous, and again I’m cackling like a crazy person. (She looked sheepish at gathering so much attention. I'd like to write more about the people who clean this office. I'd like to tell you how unobtrusively they try to work, how one kind white-haired man is to me every day. Sometime I'll tell you about that.)

Onto a blibbit from the Times now. There’s a story today about how Mayor Bloomberg is sounding less like a Bostonian and more like a New Yorker. The one sentence of the story I want to point out, however, is this:

“In 2006, [a professor] said, Mr. Bloomberg used a lot more of what linguists call a post-vocalic 'r', the sound directly after a vowel in unstressed syllables (as in Harvard rather than Hahvaahd).”

I find this sentence amazing because of the parenthetical explanation: Um, the “New York” “way” of pronouncing “Harvard” is just “Harvard.”

Id est: Bostonians are freaks.

I leave you with these words I just overheard an editor say: “My gut usually is, ‘No.’”

Or, then again, there are these words, which I just overheard after the last words I overheard: “I’m getting peckish again.”

Fuck Jersey, Enjoy the Panda

I thought I’d write to you about how New Jersey, the smelly state, has finally chosen a new tourism slogan: “New Jersey: Come See For Yourself.”

I wanted to tell you about some of the other entries, including: "New Jersey: Most of Our Elected Officials Have Not Been Indicted," but as a lifelong New Yorker, I could give a crap about New Jersey, so that’s all you’ll get.

Instead, enjoy this picture of a panda swatting tanks and helicopters (courtesy Wonkette. Thanks, Wonkette.)

Seems appropriate today. Or any day.

The Elevator as Metaphor for Chaos and Theory

Tonight I stepped onto the elevator and was sucked into another mysterious conversation, this time, involving me.

“So the New Year is getting old, right?” said an Indian-American woman to me, out of the air the moment we got on in the lobby.

“Yeah, I said,” feeling game, “but I keep wishing people ‘Happy New Year,’ as if it’s just happened!”

I felt oddly drugged, as if my instant reply could not have popped out of a sober person’s mouth. I.e. who stands at the ready for such banter as well as I just did?

“But it’s nearly two weeks old now,” she told me.

“Well, is that a good or a bad thing?” I asked her.

Her floor dinged, she began to step out, but mumbled while leaving, “I just hope…tsk…” and was gone.

I was left behind with 10 more floors to ascend and a mystery to contemplate. I still have no idea what she hopes, and I, like the rest of my colleagues, am currently wondering why the office smells faintly like marijuana.

This Is What I Kind of Learned Today

This afternoon, I rode the elevator to work with three men. One was wearing an oversized plaid jacket and nearly army-issue thick-lensed glasses. The jacket was both large in size and in pattern: a loose red/green/blue plaid. In fact, I had noticed this strange man in the strange jacket on the street, about a block from my office.

So we’re in the elevator and the strange man in the loosely plaid jacket says in a Svengali-like voice to his nondescript (i.e. I didn’t notice what he looked like) male companion: “We want 14, right? Let’s take it to 12 then, since 13 is an unlucky number.”

“Okay,” agrees the nondescript companion.

The elevated reaches 12, and the two men step off.

The exchange had happened behind me, but I can tell you that when the two men got off at the 12th floor, I turned around to the other man still there, and asked if he had heard the guys.

Laughing, he said, “They’re still going to have to pass 13, just by walking instead.”

You can’t escape unlucky things, or madness, it seems, just by taking the stairs.

Crack-Headed Cockatoo, For Your Pleasure

Trying not to poke out my eyes. This picture seems to help. See more on this blog.

“I’ve never really gone out with someone as basic as you.”

So gee. It’s 1 a.m. and “Say Anything” is on TV. I do not know why I can’t turn it off. Reminders of childhood? Of days when conversations like this seemed prophetic?:

Guy at Party: “I don't know you very well, you know, but I wanted to ask you—how'd you get Diane Court to go out with you?”
Lloyd Dobler: “I called her up.”
GAP: “But how come it worked? I mean, like, what are you?”
LD: “I'm Lloyd Dobler.”
GAP: “This is great. This gives me hope. Thanks.”

Yeah. Anyway. I recently re-read my high school yearbook in an odd moment of discovering one of two boxes that contain my childhood (divorce scatters memories, throws them in the trash). Will I ever be given words as poetic as the ones from the boy who wrote to me, “You are da bomb”? He was a bit of a stalker, yes. But who will ever say that to me again?

Then there’s the girl in the movie, who, at the party, says to Diane, “I know we were ultra-competitive this year,” when Diane clearly doesn’t know who the fuck this girl is but is terribly gracious anyway.

I have to stop before I start quoting Lili Taylor’s song: “He-eee / likes girls / named ‘Ashley'…”

(Bonus quote: "I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that. ")

Yeah. So. It’s 1 a.m. and I’m watching “Say Anything.” What are you doing? Because maybe it is better than this. Maybe you are dreaming complicated things. Maybe you are involving a random schoolmate in a complex dream when you have not even thought of this person since you were 15. It happens.

It doesn’t seem natural to get this much joy from an ‘80s nearly-brat-pack-but-not-literally movie. Are there even movies like this being made anymore? Ones that are so earnest, but not utterly stupid, heartbreaking and teenage, a movie that gives you the feeling you are as uncool as these characters and that’s okay? Movies that make you dirty dance with your 13-year-old friends in their parents’ bedroom the first time you see them? Of course not. You’re not 13 anymore.

But sometimes, maybe, you wish you were.

Self Select Yourselves Now or Be Vanquished

The New York Times, the un-cutest paper, gives us a story today on what scientists say we think is “cute”:

“The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.”

Nyet to the caterpillars, certainly not “a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock,” and absolutely no, never, on “a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.”

If you do find any of those things actually cute, you’re reading the wrong blog.

(But bravo to Natalie Angier for her description of a “cute” manatee: it “looks like an overfertilized potato with a sock puppet's face…”)