A blog about New York City, my books, and my cats. Mostly.
I was just reading about a monkey who has been alone in a cage for 18 years and who is being moved to the Save the Chimps sanctuary. Poor guy. Life will get better soon.
I always have two cats at a time, just so the cat has a member of his own species to hang out with. It doesn’t always work out ideally though.
“I love you,” Bleecker’s look says. “Why must I admire you from afar?”
It’s always a competition for me. I saw an article about writers who effectively use social media and one of the writers said he’d been tweeting since 2007. He said it like this was a big deal so of course I had to go back and see how long I’ve been tweeting, sure I’d beat him. Alas, I only matched him.
My first tweet was on June 5 2007, just a couple of days after my birthday, and I conveyed the earth-shattering message of:
Goofing off, the movie The Remains of the Day is on TV in the background.
I love that movie. LOVE. I wish it would play on tv as often as The Shawshank Redemption.
The scene below took place on 14th Street. The poor woman could not tear that little boy away from the Superman statue. It was freaking adorable.
I realize people have different opinions about the Affordable Care Act, but surely everyone can agree that people who didn’t have health insurance before being able to get it now is something to celebrate. I got this in email on the first day of sign-ups. This is the message from the New York health exchange website:
“Due to overwhelming interest in the NY State of Health – including 2 million visits in the first 2 hours of the site launch – the health exchange is currently having log in issues. We encourage users who are unable to log in to come back to the site later when these issues will be resolved.”
These are details from a photograph I found in the Museum of the City of New York digital collection. The caption reads, Choral Society, group photo taken in restaurant, and it’s dated May 17, 1926. I like zeroing in on faces. That guy to the right of the conductor, for instance. He’s like Jack Torrance in The Shining. “YOU are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker.”
One more below …
This detail is just to the right of the one above. My eye goes straight to the woman in the black dress, middle right. “There are four girls between me and that evil guy behind me,” her expression says. “Yeah, I need to move over more.”
I finished a great book last night, The Art Forger. The author, B.A. Shapiro, based her literary art-thrilled on the infamous Isabella Steward Gardner Museum heist of 1990.
As I’ve posted many, many times before, I graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, aka the Museum School, which is diagonally across the street from the Gardner Museum. I visited the Gardner a kabillion times, it’s a wonderfully eccentric place, but mostly I went to visit their Vermeer (The Concert) which sat on top of a desk instead of being hung on a wall. You were able to sit down right down in front of the painting, which sat just inches away, and look at it at eye-level. Incredible. Sadly, that was one of the paintings stolen.
That aside, it was really fun to read a book based on that place, and that heist, and where the Museum School makes several appearances. Honestly though, I wouldn’t be posting about it at all if it wasn’t such a page turner! In addition to this great mystery/thriller, Shaprio weaves in great information about art and historical art forgers, which was utterly fascinating. I got into the subject of art forgery when some friends of mine wrote a book about modern art forgers, called Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art. I love books where you also learn something, in an entertaining, seamless way.
I worked the polls yesterday, for 16 hours straight. It’s amazing who you meet. This was at my poll site at PS3. In this picture are at least two well-known people!!
