95 cent Hoffa Cupcakes

95 cent Hoffa Cupcakes
Originally uploaded by mcbickle.

The town of Milford, Mich., really knows how to yuck it up. As the search continues on the nearby Hidden Dreams Farm for the body of Jimmy Hoffa, residents there are having a morbid hootenanny.

From the accompanying NYT article:

"An F.B.I. informant, now in prison, claims he saw Mr. Hoffa buried in 1975, rolled up in a rug. A large tent was erected on Monday to house the horses that will be displaced by the excavation.

The dig on the farm, about 30 miles northwest of Detroit, is the most extensive search for Mr. Hoffa's remains since he disappeared 31 years ago from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant 17 miles east of the farm."

Worst. Pickup Line. Ever.

I was at a bar last night with a friend. Said friend got up to pee. She left her perfectly average, if thin, cell phone on the bar.

“That’s a really cool phone,” the guy who had been on the other side of my friend leans over and says to me.

“Yeah, it’s not mine,” I say, looking away.

“It looks like something out of ‘Star Trek,’” he says.

Way to go, buddy. Ain’t no girl in New York, no matter how secretly nerdy she is, that will think that’s a good conversation opener.

“Why, yes!” I might have said. “That’s so insanely hot of you to notice my friend’s phone! ‘Star Trek,’ yeah! Can we go to a convention together sometime? Wanna beam me back to your house tonight?”

Live long, and date never, dude.

Poodles as Phallic Objects

I’m reading a book called “Sex Collectors,” by Geoff Nicholson. It was in our slush pile at work, which often bears good reads. It’s about exactly what it says—people who collect sexual objects or erotica.

Here’s a passage I enjoyed this morning on the subway. It is in regard to Cynthia Plaster Caster, who became kind of well known in the 1970s for making plaster casts of rock stars’ penis. She did Jimi Hendrix, among others.

“I asked Cynthis if she collected anything else besides penises. Well yes, she said, she did collect penis-shaped objects: you know, lamps, candles, models of skyscrapers, that sort of thing. She also collects models of poodles. They’re the most phallic dogs, she said, and then corrected herself by saying no, they weren’t phallic in themselves, but they were the dogs whose phalli showed most conspicuously. On the top of her fridge are improvised still lifes where model poodles and cast penises happily intermingle, she said.”

On the top of my fridge, a bottle of Maker’s Mark and cans of lentils unfeelingly sit next to each other. Which is not to say I would not allow a phallic poodle to mix among them.

Wabbits

I'm on the phone, trying to remember what lives in a "warren." Yesterday, I overheard someone using the phrase "a warren of -----" and it is suddenly driving me crazy that I don't know what lives in a warren. So here we go:

7 entries found for warren.
war·ren    ( P )  Pronunciation Key  (wôrn, wr-)
n.

1.
a. An area where rabbits live in burrows.
b. A colony of rabbits. See Synonyms at flock1.

2. An enclosure for small game animals.
3.
a. An overcrowded living area.
b. A mazelike place where one may easily become lost: a warren of narrow, dark alleys and side streets.

Do you like how the definitions progress from sweet and cuddly to slightly unpleasant to kind of creepy to downright upsetting in a horror-story kind of way?

I do.

I’m Not That Amercan Girl

I had an e-mail fest last night that spanned the globe. Let me explain.

I received a letter that was clearly not meant for me (it was obviously meant for some other McBickle.) It had been forwarded to me by another redacted name. (I love playing redactor. It feels like revenge to all those Redactors who ran their black markers through all the many documents I’ve had to read in my work over the years. It also reminds me of the redactors of the Old Testament. But that’s another story.) It opened like this:

>hi dear friend [redacted]: i am [redacted] from syria i hope you still remember
>me , we meet in turky in istanbul in oreint hostel .
>how are you ? i hope every thing is good with you . am so sorry
>because i didn't write to you emedaitly but i was so bezy so much
>with my case the refeege case with the u.n and with canadian embecy
>and olso i don't know how to write good eglish but finly here i am
>because i am always say to my self tomworrw i will write to . promes
>you to write because as i say to befor it will so nice to see you
>again.

I definitely don’t want to make fun of this guy’s poor eglish, especially because he sounds embattled enough already, but I do want to tell you the culmination of the series of e-mails I exchanged over this.

First, though, here is how the letter continued:

how is your friend the amercan girl ( sorry i don't remember haer
>name ) plese say hi tohaer from my and do tell haer that i forget
>haer name :-)

Clearly, he’s talking about McBickle. The other one.

I sent the nice guy who forwarded me (seemingly the other me) this sweet note (part of me likes being haer) a nice note explaining that he’d found the wrong person.

He apologized. A lot.

No biggie, I wrote back.

Then he sent me this:

“Well, like I said I'm sorry anyway. Just in case you were wondering, I'm a Briton from...Britain. But this e-mail was sent from Germany and meant for another American from Detroit. It was originally sent from a Syrian who was in Turkey. Apparently a lot of kids in America have no idea where Turkey is.”

The world, folks, is clearly wide, even if most of us Amrecans don't know how the globe is mapped. The possibilities, I do believe, are endless.

I Found My First Gray Hair Today. Really. I Did.

I awoke early to get a fancy, free haircut. I’ve done this before—it entails signing up months in advance and arriving early and sitting for two hours through a class in a white bright room where a bevy of hairdressers all examine your hair and touch it. I was told last time I did this, in front of all the students, that I had a “high occipital bone.” News to me.

The haircut, it turns out, is next Tuesday.

Ah, that leaves me with 4.5 hours till I have to be at work, today, I thought, very loudly, to myself.

First, I wander to the Hudson River. I observe the bike riders, the construction dudes, the smell of the slaughterhouses that are left in the Meatpacking District and the bars that have grown up around the bloody stank with names like “The Hog Pit.”

I call my sister. I head east to her place of work, which turns out to be MoMA, which turns out to be closed for the day. I turn out to see the Munch exhibit, and I turn out to cringe at the painful beauty of his woodcuts, lithographs and paintings, and at the names of them, like “Angst,” and “Angst II.” I find myself honestly shocked at all the bones and fetuses and misery he interpreted.

My sister and I discuss the Scandinavians and their pain.

“It’s really real,” she insists.

“Is it the dark winters?” I wonder aloud.

We discuss the merits of her boyfriend being from Denmark.

We discuss her projected inability to ever be able to speak Danish.

“Oh,” I say. “Of course you can. I thought I couldn’t learn a non-romance language, but hey, I picked up some Hebrew when I tried.”

“Yeah,” she says, “but no. I can’t pronounce a single word correctly.”

In my mind, I’m thinking, yeah, that’s my sister, the Grand Cynic of New York.

“Oh yeah?” I say. “I’m sure you’d get used to it.”

“Okay,” she says. “Take, for instance, the word ‘K-Y-D.’ How would you pronounce that?”

“Hmm,” I say, considering what the sneaky Danish trick might be to this arrangement of letters. I like a language challenge. I can do this, I think. I’ve studied four and am a writer by birth. I say, with total awareness that I have failed this test, “I guess I can only think it would be “kid” or “kyde.”

“Ah,” she says with contempt and awe. “It is pronounced ‘KYULE.’”

Kyule. Kyule…Kyule. I feel my mind being eaten alive.

We take cover in the industrial design exhibit, where I fall deeply into reverie over a Le Corbusier chair and a teacup that is low and thin that makes me wish I lived in 1935 and had a fine taste in objects. I round out the day in the Museum of American Folk Art, appreciating the wood fish lures that are shaped and painted like real fish. Like, say, trout.

Zeppelins Were Cool, Until They Weren't

Zeppelins Were Cool, Until They Weren't
Originally uploaded by mcbickle.

I'm not sure of the details of this zeppelin raid, but it sounds similar to this one: "January 19, 1915, the first bombing of civilians ever, in which two Zeppelins dropped twenty-four 50 kg high explosive bombs and ineffective 3 kg incendiaries on Great Yarmouth, Sheringham, Kings Lynn and the surrounding villages. In all four people were killed, sixteen injured and monetary damage estimated at £7,740."

That's if you believe Wikipedia.

Happily, today, I am celebrating the Empire State Building's 75th birthday. It has been unlit for the past three nights to symbolize a skyline before it was built. Tonight it will be bright white.

Just now on NY1 I saw some footage of the only blimp to dock atop the ESB before someone decided it was too dangerous to do again. This was what the tippy top was meant for before the TV antenna was placed there.

I got to wondering if it was actually a zeppelin or just a blimp that landed there. I didn't get far enough to determine that, as I clearly got waylaid by this image.