Stacy Horn

I already posted about Elsie and the Oke Doke here. But it was a bar on East 84th Street that I used to go to back in the early 1980s. Kevin Connell was nice enough to send me a picture of Elsie (with one of the regulars according to Kevin, a woman named Irene). Thank you, Kevin!

He looks so innocent in the picture below. I took that not long after bringing Bleecker home for the first time. How could we have known that to this day his favorite thing in the world is jumping on the back of my poor old arthritic and diabetic cat Finney, then wrapping all his legs around Finney’s belly while he chomps on his neck. He just did it again! Just now, as I started to describe it! He doesn’t chomp hard, he just wants to play.

But Finney most definitely does not want to play. We have tried to make this clear to Bleecker, but he pretends to not understand. For the millionth time: Finney, I’m sorry for bringing the monster into the house.

I’m still reading my friend’s book, The Country of Ice Cream Star. It’s going to take me a while because of work on my own book, but it’s just blowing me away. I recently read this line in the book:

“The worst thing about a war, senyora, is that it produces war heroes.”

Aside from the death, yeah. And actually, maybe it is worse than death because making war heroes leads to even more death.

Crowds at the America’s Cup. We do love a hero, don’t we? We make them all over the place.

See that small patch of evergreen trees in the distance? That’s my favorite spot to sit in Washington Square Park. Weirdly, I don’t have to fight for it. It’s not at all popular and there is always an entire bench free. I like to sit a little bit away from them so I look out at them.

Kantorei of Kansas City has started a Kickstarter campaign in order to record an album of Christmas music. They promise to include “previously unrecorded gems of the late Renaissance” (by Melchior Vulpius and Blasius Ammon)! There is never enough Christmas music in the world, and to have pieces we’ve never heard before is a great gift!

A view of the Municipal Building from the Hudson River. The Municipal Building is across the street from the beginning of Chambers Street, and I walk up to it whenever I visit the Municipal Archives. Is the west side higher than the east side? It can’t be, right? But this view seems elevated to me.