sundries

We've just seen Patty's parents off and now are each doing work things. Prior, omlettes and goat cheese were involved.

Last night we went to Lincoln Center and walked around. The tent was still up from Fashion Week, but all that was over. And we went up onto this weird sloped park that's on the roof of a restaurant. It was the weirdest, most delightful urban space, and it made me very happy. Like Millennium Park in Chicago, it reminds me of the future.

Last night we also went to a bookstore where I finally picked up the Cyteen sequel. And, while we were there I saw Romeo & Juliet & Vampires in the YA section. I can't decide if this is brilliant, a more adequate than usual response to a current fad, completely annoying because of the power differentials in the way it's structured (Juliet should be hunted, hunted by Romeo), or just something I wish would stop already since pretty much most iterations of this trend are completely phoned in. I am torn. I feel like I'm not evaluating fairly as I'm having an inappropriate low-culture/high-culture moment about it, as opposed to really thinking about it.

Awesome death/mourning query sent out. Yay me.

Bed bugs are horrific. However, I find myself oddly entertained by the bed bug alarm and how we're processing it here in New York. Mainly, by using photoshop inappropriately. Sorry about those GIANT bed bugs, Nike.

New Yorkers continue to have questions about the recent tornadoes. These things are very novel to us, and we don't know why the sky is green.

Edward I. Koch was the mayor I grew up with. When he left office, I was glad. He was emblematic to me of one more politician who wasn't doing enough about the right things -- like AIDS -- and someone who used race in an incredibly self-serving way when New York was at its most divided. Since then, though, we've had Dinkins (lovely, but ineffective man who I met many times in my first public relations job), Giuliani (who didn't clean up New York so much as destroy its grit; then was eloquent when we needed him to be, and yet later thought that that gave him a right to exploit our city forever), and Bloomberg (who has done great stuff in terms of public spaces, is a force of benign or peculiar neglect on most other issues, and has been awesome on the Muslim community center issue). Which makes me say, yeah, Mayor Koch had a lot of flaws, but was also sort of awesome, or maybe it's just that New York has always been something special when fighting for its own survival.

Manfred Gans served in the British military during WWII, after his parents German-Jewish parents sent him to England to escape the Nazis. After helping to free his hometown of Borken, he then went in search of his parents. And found them. Alive. Gans died today, at age 88.