Month: February 2016

I spent a day trying to find out the exact wording on a New York City law from the 19th century. How hard could it be, I thought. I’ll google it and find the exact wording for whatever law was on the books at the time, end of story.

Mother of God. First, I learned very quickly how much I do not know. Like, what’s the difference between a statute, a law, an ordinance, and what else is out there? Something called “common law,” I learned.

I can’t tell you the number of places I looked and then it became a thing, and I couldn’t rest. I wouldn’t be able to stop working and go to bed until I found it, or at least found reason to hope that I could, like tracking down a book I could look at in the library the next day. I think I may have finally found my answer and I emailed an NYU professor for help and to confirm, but who knows if he will answer. He probably gets a katrillion people like me emailing him every day.

It made me realize that in addition to needing to find a medical historian willing to comment on some of the things I’ve found for this book I’m working on (that’s a whole other post) I need to find a legal historian.

A Finney and Bleeck encounter that ended in … a kiss. Perhaps I should have saved this rare moment for Valentine’s Day.

They were doing a shoot for the TV show Limitless down at the Municipal Archives today. I’m a fan of the show, so that was fun. That’s Jake McDorman, the star of the show, being checked for exposure to … uranium? Plutonium? Who knows! I was hoping to catch some of the other actors, like Jennifer Carpenter, or Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and the guys who play Mike and Ike, but no go, alas. Still, fun.

Floating by in the sky outside my window. I hope they weren’t escapees from a child’s birthday party. Or the kind you release when someone dies, to symbolize their going to Heaven.

The book I’m writing right now about how we treated the poor, the criminal, and the insane in the 19th century is a horror story.

I know I keep repeating this, but of course I could write about how we treat the poor, the criminal, and the mentally ill in this country now, and it would still be a horror story.

I’ve moved on to the penal sections of the book and it’s making me even angrier and more upset. The system is such that certain crimes and groups of people are focused on and they go to jail while other criminals and groups are left entirely alone. That is also the same now, thank you Matt Taibbi and your book, The Divide.

Finney, relaxing in the sunlight until …

He comes along.

I took a quick shot of a dog walker and then noticed I had walked into a film set …

It was for Blue Bloods, which I actually enjoy although the writing for Tom Selleck’s character, Police Commissioner Frank Reagan, got weird a while back. It got weird for the whole show really. There’s an unpleasant undercurrent I no longer like. Thankfully, it’s faint.

I noticed Limitless, another show I enjoy, is about to film in my neighborhood, except I didn’t note the day. Hopefully not today because it’s SNOWING! YAY!