Month: August 2002
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If you could bet on predicting when bad restaurants in Astoria closed, I’d be retired
I’ve been editing down this bunch of journals from 1997-1999 to make it into a book, and it’s harder than you’d think. The first thing is that it’s difficult to throw away pieces of it to get the size of the book down. I’m currently at about 140,000 words, and I want it below 100K.…
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Pollock
It’s a cool Friday night, with a nice temperature that makes it feel like October. It’s even a three-day weekend, and even though I didn’t line up a trip out of town, I feel pretty good about staying here. This is the first time in a long time it’s felt like a Friday night of…
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rain
It’s pouring, pouring rain outside. All of the streets are turning into rivers, especially in Astoria where all of the guidos throw their trash right into the street, blocking the drainage vents for the storm sewers. I’ve also recently found out, thanks to a public service announcement ad that runs on the subways, that this…
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Fozzy
So the Fozzy show on Friday night went well. I got to Times Square at about 6:30 and grabbed a hot dog and a Coke before I got in line at the World. There were a fair number of people there, and I was further back than when me and Ray went to a Smackdown…
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haloscan
I think I have figured out a new commenting system for my journal. It was a bit of a stretch to find something that worked with plain-jane HTML, but haloscan.com seems to do the trick. The only problem is it will involve major drudgery to get it to work with past entries. Maybe I can…
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Trip report procrastination
I’ve been digging through notes and trying to type up a trip report about my last visit to Vegas in July, but it’s been a total bitch. I didn’t take many notes, and I have an outline, but it’s hard to get worked up about this and type anything that’s worthwhile. I’m tempted to just…
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Womb of air conditioning
I managed to settle into my small womb of air-conditioning around midnight last night, after my third cold shower of the day. When the air conditioner shut off at 2:00 because the dehumidifier tank was already full, I felt really sick, even when standing right in front of the freon-cool air. I’d been drinking water…
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Minority Report
It’s day seven of over-90-degree weather in New York City, and my tolerance for this is beyond low. I feel like I’m trying to survive the desert or something. I do have a tiny AC in my room, but it only runs for a few hours before its humidity take fills, so I usually wake…
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All-ice asteroid plans
The heat situation here is at a level where I spend large amounts of time wondering how global climates work and if there’s some way we could tow an all-ice asteroid into orbit and use it to cool cities and generate water without pumping more heat into the air. That’s the real rub there; you…
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From a Blue Planet
I’m happy today – I got the Chuck Greenberg album From a Blue Planet today. I’ve been searching for this for years, and finally found a used copy on Amazon’s marketplace. Chuck was the main man behind Shadowfax, a former Windham Hill new age/jazz band that I’ve been obsessed with since the late 1980s. I…