Month: December 2012

Nothing serious! But I woke up and Echo’s web server was down. Echo is the social network I run, and we also have a web server, which hosts this blog, among other things. When I called our host to fix it they brought both our machines down! The web server is now back up, but I’m in state, waiting for the machine that hosts the social network part to come back up.

Aaaaaaaand I just burned my breakfast/lunch. Terrific. This is not an apartment with a lot of back-up food. I’ll update later.

Update: Echo is completely back up, burnt food eaten.

I took this on my way to the best Christmas Eve party EVER. It snowed while I walked, and then turned to rain by the time I got there. But I was strolling in the snowfall for a few minutes!! It was great.

The musicians and some of the singers. I wasn’t kidding when I said this was a great party. It was such a wonderful group of people, every one of them open and friendly and interesting, and it was in an apartment that had that old New York feel which is almost entirely gone. I was so happy. The hosts were two sisters who lived in my building about twenty years ago and I ran into one of them on my roof last 4th of July. They’ve known my next door neighbors since they were children, so she was there to watch the fireworks.

The guy in the plaid lives in Vermont but he’s been coming down to Jane Street near me for the past 24 years to sell Christmas trees. That’s his son on the bass. Ohmygod, I just realized, the Christmas trees I posted the picture of other day were his! Here he is, on the far left!! Isn’t that funny? You take a picture of some random guy, and a couple of days later you’re sitting next to him, singing.

This is the penthouse view, taken last night during the best dinner party in New York City! (Thank you, Peter and Miguel!) I asked Peter if they sometimes dance around the apartment singing, “I just adore a Penthouse view …” (if you’re not a baby boomer, or boomer-ish, you probably don’t know the reference). My camera doesn’t do night shots very well, but this is the Empire State Building of course, all dressed up for Christmas.

I originally planned to lounge about watching Christmas tv all day, leaving the house only to pick up a Christmas present I ordered for someone, hopefully getting some fun pictures of Christmas Eve in the city along the way, and I might still do that, but I’m deciding.

What is everyone else doing today??

I meant to post about this yesterday, because there was an article in the Times about how Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol was going to air last night for the first time in decades. (Except I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it on TV within the last five years or so.) I love Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol and I watch it every year. I do have a couple of disagreements with the author of the article, though.

One, he thought the song Winter is Warm was the emotional core of the movie, and I don’t know. That was always a slow section for me as a child, although as an adult I appreciate the bittersweet beauty of it. And two, he went on about the humor of We’re Despicable section, which was never funny for me, then or now, and it goes on way too long. I love that I can fast forward through it these days.

For me the emotional core of the movie is the conflict and truth between the tragic All Alone in the World (my favorite song in the movie) and the redemptive The Lord’s Bright Blessing. I’d include The Winter is Warm and make it a tragic/redemptive triangle, but Belle is dropped in this adaptation. Dickens gives her a husband in the book, thank you, Dickens. In fact, why is Belle either dropped or ends up a spinster in movie (or animated) versions?

I learned that the animator Darrell Van Citters has actually written a book called Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol: The Making of the First Animated Christmas Special. I will have to take a look!

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Another nice thing about living in New York City: someone is always promoting something and you could just be walking along the street and someone hands you free stuff. The people in this picture gave me a candy cane and a truly lovely blank notebook. The day before, when I was walking home from the gym, I got a bottle of a something called NeuroBliss (which I haven’t tried yet).

I can’t say that 666 is a work of television art, except there’s one very telling thing, at least in terms of how much I enjoy this show: when I look at all the shows I’ve DVR’ed, if 666 is among them I always watch it first. (Sometimes I watch the best shows first in case the world is about to end—I want to make sure to get my favorites in before it does.) 666 is deliciously entertaining and if it’s on the list I can’t wait to watch it.

This is partially my fault. Had I been more ambitious and gotten a job in tv AND worked my way up to network president, AND then become the president of all the networks (made-up job alert) I could have prevented all the great shows from bring cancelled.

In the picture below, we catch Santa snatching a child at Rockefeller Center. Just kidding. A skating Santa was having a photo-op with a young fellow skater.

Wait, was the world supposed to end at midnight last night or is it tonight?

Anyway, while we’re all waiting, I want to draw your attention to this mind-blowingly great article in the New York Times, Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. Not only is the article stunning and so well researched, their use of multimedia is the best I have ever seen. The Times has set the bar.

I left a comment, but I rewrote part of a sentence and then forgot to go back and change the beginning. Now it has a wrong word in it and I look illiterate. This is killing me. They don’t give you a way to go back and edit. Sometimes I read an old posts of mine here and I find mistakes and cringe (and fix them). I wonder how many there are.

Parents outside a school playground. The crowd stretches further right and left, beyond the confines of this shot. I live near a school and frequently have to walk in the street to avoid these mobs of parents. It bothered me at first but I realized there wasn’t much they could do about it. The space is small, their numbers are large, and this is life in the big city. We all must do our best to accommodate each other. I wonder what they do to accommodate me?