Stacy Horn

Last night I passed through Times Square on my way to a Tufts alumni event (that’s where I went undergraduate). It was for journalism grads, but they opened it up to anyone working in media and I’ve written books, and done the occasional piece for NPR, I count!

It was warm out and so there were a lot of people milling about way under-dressed. I gotta believe that most of these people are not New Yorkers. I’ve never heard of going to Times Square to hang out.

And yes, if there are cops on horses in my field of vision I’m going to take a picture of them.

Damnit. I have to leave for my temp job. No time to say anything. I was going to post about the words to a 14th century motet by Philippe de Vitry titled Rex Quem Metrorum. I wrote them down last year and they’re so weird I must have gotten them wrong:

“It must be proclaimed openly at the meeting-places, the abominable madness of these ages, the demented frenzy of dogs, launched on the world by the eternal Satan …”

My plan was to look it up and write about it. Some other time!

You know that billboard I keep posting pictures of? It’s on Park Avenue and turns out my temp job is a bunch of blocks uptown from it.

Various buildings around Manhattan have these barriers, I guess to stop terrorists from driving trucks filled with bombs into them. But this bank put these beautiful metal-worked … cosies over theirs. A lovely solution.

I had such plans for this week. I was going to go to the library around my temp job, but that’s not going to happen. I don’t even know if I’m going to get to all my email this morning. What was I going to post about? See??? I’m totally frazzled. Well. Hmmm.

I totally forgot to do a Valentine’s Day post yesterday, OR to do anything nice for myself so I’m going to celebrate Valentine’s Day on Sunday. It’s just going to be me and the cats but NO JUDGING. Our love cannot be denied.

The temp job I’m doing this week is great. I knew two of the other people doing it! And they’re feeding us, and there were delicious vegetarian options. Usually vegetarian options fall into the “it’s either this or starve” category.

Passed by this building on my way home yesterday. Loved all the pretty colors in the building and the clouds.

Sally Rhine Feather (the daughter of J. B. Rhine, the head of the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory) mentioned this book to me, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness by Oren Harman.

I was immediately curious because George Price had written about parapsychology very early on and got into a nasty exchange with Rhine. Price was particularly, shockingly hostile. I mean, okay, don’t accept their experiments but come on. A book with “kindness” in the title along with the name George Price was just so “does not compute” for me. I read the first few pages and got sucked in. Then I skipped to the section about Rhine and got even more sucked in.

There was an interesting revelation. Price said he really went after Rhine because he thought Rhine was religious and these experiments were somehow a backdoor to bolstering religion. Rhine was not religious however, he was something between agnostic and atheist. Price apologized many years later, they started writing each other again, and apparently Price lost it again.

Anyway, complex guy, sad ending, looks like a truly fascinating story. When will I be able to read it?? I’m doing a week long focus group-like thing. I’m going to be going through a new website, answering questions, helping find problems. It’s 8 – 10 hours a day for 5 days. (Must be a humongous website.)

Finney. A complex cat. Loves me, but also loves to bite me. (Not hard, but still.)