Does it get any better than first-snow photos of your neighborhood taken with a bad phone camera late on the Saturday night before Christmas? (Sure it does, but not this year and not this night: this year, this night, this is as good as it gets.)
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New York
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Saturday, November 07, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Friday, October 02, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
M.J. Celebration
Yesterday afternoon, by the Tweed Courthouse, outside City Hall Park, New York. I assume these guys are out every weekend, but yesterday, all the music was Thriller and pre-Thriller Michael Jackson:
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Do You Remember, Dear Reader?...
Do you remember, dear reader, the spring of 2009, when it rained for 748 days straight? Of course you don't. I forget: I am ninety-eight years old and you were but a twinkle in a twinkle of the eye of someone who, himself, was a twinkle in someone's eye in 2009. That was before the National Weather Service abandoned the misguided idea that it was possible to passively predict the weather and got into the business of actively controlling it. That was in 2024, but I doubt you remember that either, nor do I expect that you remember Delaware. Delaware? Well, if you're like other East American children, you've taken a class trip or two to Very Large Fan Alpha. So, VLF-A used to be a state. It was called Delaware. The word "Idaho" probably doesn't mean anything to you either, does it... Jesus, don't they make you guys take history?
That's alright. Just know that you're lucky. Just know that when we used to get rain here on the east coast, it didn't arrive promptly at 5:30 in the afternoon and depart promptly at 6:05. Some days, it would rain all day, followed by another day of rain, and another. And that day would be followed by rain too, a day which itself would be followed by eighty-two days of rain, after which it would rain for maybe a week or two more before pausing for seven minutes at 3:47 in the morning before raining for another month.
I made the above image in the summer of 2004. (The original said "...or in a fucking rainforest." I took out the "fucking" before publishing this image on my site. Very unlike me; I wonder why I did that. It disturbs me a little that I did that. Also, I just can't imagine under what circumstances I would have felt the need to do that.)
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
What You'll Find If You Go In Search Of Spring At The Brooklyn Botanic Gardens In February
What you'll find are, e.g., furry bud-things which definitely look sort of springy:
Also, you will see fish swimming around in water as opposed to not swimming around because they're encased in a large brick of ice and because they're dead:
As encouraging as the out-of-doors spring-style signs are the BBG, though, the real excitement, you're likely to find, is inside, in the greenhouses. I've been going to these gardens for almost two decades, but I don't think I'd ever gone inside before this past weekend. These here (in the "temperate/warm" greenhouse) are some Orange Flowers:
These guys, also in the "temperate/warm" greenhouse, are some Other Type Of Nice Flowerz:
Also in the "temperate/warm" greenhouse (although doesn't it look like it belongs in the "tropical" greenhouse? That's not where it was, though; it was in the "temperate/warm" greenhouse, so go figure, or, if you prefer, don't) is this flower, which looks like a bird:
I don't remember which greenhouse this plant was in, nor am I positive, actually, that it's plant and not animal of some sort:
This disturbingly phallic nature item depends menacingly from a bunch of unripe bananas in the "tropical" greenhouse -- if you were a child, wouldn't you go home and sleep with the lights on for like at least two weeks or perhaps months?
No? Here's what its shaft looks like up close...
...at least two weeks, right?
Thought so.
Now, here's what a cactus (found in the "desert" greenhouse) looks like after it's died. Disturbing, isn't it? These things are supposed to live for a long, long time on the water an nutrients that they store up, aren't they? But here's this skeletal, former cactus (and this really is sort of a skeleton, isn't it? And/but since when do plants have skeletons?). Or, I should say, here is what I believe to be a skeletal, former cactus, because if you go to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens with your girlfriend looking for signs of spring, you may be told that this dead cactus is "driftwood." When you ask what driftwood would be doing in the desert instead of by the seashore, you will be treated like a child who doesn't understand the ways of the real, grown-up world:
