Nobody 786

Sunday, October 4, 2009
Nobody # 786

Nobody Asked Me But:

If I could leap over tall buildings
With a single bound,
I might visit NYC
And not feel humbled. jt

I am home and happy. Barb too. We had a great trip and New York City was every thing I hoped for and expected. And so was our bed when we crawled in late Friday night – actually Saturday morning about 2:30 by New York time. The time since then has been too short to prepare my usual vacation review. That will have to wait until next week. But I have a few things to mention today.

TOTAL DELIGHT

We were at a free concert featuring Peter Yarrow (The Peter from Peter, Paul and Mary) Judy Collins and Tom Paxton - more about this delightful experience next week – when Barbara noticed this little girl sitting on the floor with her mother singing along with the three as they did their rendition of “Puff.” She knew all the words and even had the facial gestures down pat, looking appropriately sad when “Jackie Paper came no more.”

ALL ABOUT TAXIS

I have known petrifying fear 30 times in my life and they all occurred in the last 10 days while riding in NYC taxies.

If I ever had any doubts about natural selection and survival of the fittest they ended in those taxies. They had to be the quick or we all would have been the dead.

Actually you can see Darwin at work in NYC pedestrians as well. Ignoring traffic signals they play the matador deftly twisting and turning, creating near misses at every intersection.

Back to the taxi drivers: they must be a religious lot and give thanks every day for their cell phones, which provide them with a distraction from the boredom of driving with hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.

If you are into the math of NYC, the numbers to remember are 20 and 80. For every dollar you pay in taxi fares 20 cents covers moving time and the other 80 cents is for the time you are stuck in traffic or waiting for green lights.

And finally, the phrase you must remember when sight-seeing from your taxi is – There it is…..was.<<<

ALL THE NEWS JUST REPEATS ITSELF

The LA Times saved time and energy while we were gone by repeating this headline over and over and over:

Dodgers miss chance to clinch NL West title.<<<

Four little words - and I love them: “Sent from my iPhone.”<<<

Smart - Bill Frist, former Republican Senate Majority Leader: “If I were still in the Senate, "I would end up voting for it." (The Obama health care proposal.)

Not so smart – Arizona Senator Jon Kyl on the health care proposal: “I don’t need maternity care.”<<<

THE EMPERORS HAVE ON CLOTHES or – those aren’t real wizards behind the mikes.

David Brooks had an excellent column in Friday’s NY Times. He writes about the failure of Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, O’Reilly and company to deliver voters in the 2008 primaries and election. As he points out, they couldn’t even beat McCain in South Carolina.

He says that those who quake at every word from the Rush bunch might really be living in Oz.

Here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/opinion/02brooks.html

Just as I pulled into the garage a few minutes ago after my Sunday ritual of gas station and Starbuck’s, the novel I was listening to came to its end. Its title was “The Girl With The Golden Tattoo,” by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson. It was excellent easily one of my all-time best audio books. The story is about a muckraker for a Swedish magazine and the tattooed young hacker who helps him solve the disappearance 40 years earlier of the niece of a business magnate. My words do not do justice to this excellent book. Read it or listen to it if you can. You will find it in a trade edition at your local bookstore.

I might be even more saddened by the fact that I have finished except that I have the sequel here on my desk and ready to load into my car CD player. It is called “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and is currently a best seller.