Blogomat... Just looking in the Times magazine again today and noticed the article by the older guy who ruins himself playing Tennis every chance that he gets, and how Americans have become big "consumers" of exercise. Our President is characterized as a "gym rat", people pay big bucks to join gyms with special machines to exercise, and I am constantly being shoved off the sidewalk or roadway by rollerbladers or cyclers intent on getting their exercise. They all have special little suits to wear too. Pastel shorts, little warm-up items with white stripes down the sides, helmets, kneepads, exercise bras, wrist weights, sneakers. Thus, exercise has been transformed into a consumable item, a consumable that can be referenced as a class item. The other day on the train coming back from Ocean Hill I eavesdropped in on a conversation between a young black man, and a white classmate he met on the train going to Manhattan. After catching up on grades and class schedules, the white guy asked where the black guy was heading-" Oh I'm going to my gym in Manhattan... You mean you go all the way into Manhattan to use a gym? Well yes, you meet better people, and the whole experience is just better in Manhattan...." I ride a bike for basic transportation inside the City. I've been riding a bike for just about my whole life for transportation, first as a protest against automobile culture in Buffalo where I grew up, then as cheap transportation in Germany where it cost over a thousand marks to get a license in lessons fees, and finally in New York, where I rode a bike to my job in midtown everyday until they laid us off. During the nineties, I got a car as a gift, and became a car owner for the first time in my adult life. We use the Buick to go outside the City and on vacations, but still use the bike to get around town- no parking muss, quick routes through traffic, nice routes through parks, no subway or bus fare. The exercise has been a pretty secondary reason for owning a bike - a cheap one that doesn't get stolen more than every two or three years. Everyday on the elevator, my nesighbors confuse me with one who is part of the exercise culture- "Oh, are you going out for exercise? Do you ride in the park? " I nicely but pointedly say, "No, I am going to a meeting", or "I have errands to run. " I wonder how much longer the guy who ruins himself playing tennis, or the young black guy that rides into Manhattan just to use a better class of gym, will keep on exercising. I wonder if the tennis guy rides to the courts in a big black SUV, like many of my neighbors, even in the upper west side of Manhattan. When did exercise become something that was the province of the rich ( or middle class) and the young, or those aspiring to be young and/or rich? How come when I travel outside the City I rarely see anyone outside walking or riding a bike dressed in normal clothes as if they were heading to church, or a shopping center? I wonder how exercise, which used to be an inevitable part of everyday life performed by everyone as part of going about their normal daily business, became a class conscious consumable item.

In the bushes...Looking at the shrub on TV this week, I flashed on an image of the inside his head - that if you could lift off the top of his head and peer inside you'd see a little brown leather brain, wheezing like a tiny bellows when the shrub cogitated about those bothersome things like what he calls the "skepticists," or tried to remember the name of the country that his good friend Tony Blair represents. Like two tiny leather footballs stuck together...

More slow burn...Look, I know the term "burn rate" has been around for a while in places like venture capital firms...I've just never heard it applied by high level government officials to a war in front of nationwide TV before. A Secretary of Defense that refers to the use of our taxes as the "burn rate" in a war that's not really over and where people are getting killed doesn't really inspire much confidence. What's the insider slang for the deaths over there? "broken units?" The government usually doesn't give us an inside view of what they really think about us on national TV. Of course we all know that this gang is in high office because they are ambitious and want power, and not particularly interested in helping people, serving the public, saving money, educating children, or making our country better and a good place to live for everyone. But this is the first time I remember hearing officials in an administration talk the talk that they use behind the scenes right out in the open. And how does that term jibe with a deliberate manipulation of intelligence to get them the war they want? And, after hearing how they really feel about us, how are we supposed to swallow the platitudes dished out to us about freedom, liberty, and being a shining beacon of democracy for the world? How do you justify the two persona's here- the President who gets up every day to read his Bible and tells us that "Amurrica is being tested" and an administration that talks about the "burn rate" for our money? Or how about that guy Brenner on "Meet the Press" this morning who, when asked about the four soldiers killed in an ambush yesterday, included in his answer talk about how the tide of forces for freedom and justice were on the rise. How can we take that seriously? Can you imagine if four people were ambushed up on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx and Commissioner Kelly told a reporter that " the tide of justice is rising in New York" ? There are definitely some unmatched codes here- one behind the scenes a group of testosterone driven, power mad, oil glutted elite power queens, and the other- a pious, Jesus saved, prayerful simple folk face, who just wants us to all get along., but "he's going to get those evil varmits who are causing all thet ruckus over there..." Come to think of it, I'll take the power mad millionaires...

NY Cowboy- 6-23-2003
Broadway Cowboy


A couple of weeks ago at about 7 p.m. we were cruising up and down Broadway in my Buick, looking for the store Judy remembered that had blueberries for $2 a pint and came upon a cowboy in full cowboy work gear with his horse on the west side of Broadway at 94th Street.

Judy whipped out her digital camera and took a picture [which i am unable to post here because technical difficulties] as I exhorted her to "get in the buildings... No one will believe this is New York unless you get the buildings into the picture..." The Cowboy had parked his horse at a parking meter, and without putting any quarters into the meter, went into a fruit and vegetable market to buy carrots and Romaine lettuce, which he fed to his horse. There is a car parked on the expired meter, behind the horse, but it moved out just after we took the picture. The person with the car came across Broadway, glanced at the horse, got into the car and pulled out when traffic was clear, without any acknowledgment of the horse obstacle, other than avoiding it and not blowing their horn. The pedestrians were equally blasé- about one in 3 actually looked, and the only people besides Judy and I that stopped were some tourists from out of town who actually engaged the Cowboy in conversation. (We could tell they were tourists cause they had on pink and blue pastel jersey shorts and tops that tourists wear.) I was double parked in front of the Whole Foods supermarket and didn’t want to leave the car, so I didn’t find out the pertinent information like "where are you from...where does your horse sleep at night?" We found the blueberries at Barzzinis, but when we went back to see the cowboy again he was gone- disappeared into the sunset over New Jersey.

Just as a matter of mild interest, since I am deep in the throes of amending my 2002 taxes just what is that thing that the white house refers to as our current "burn rate" in Iraq? The first time I ever heard the term burn rate was out of Rummy-(one of my all time faves) on Sunday July 13 with George Stephanopolis. It just slithered out, "Burn Rate" and George didn't bat an eyelash. Emboldened, Rummy started slinging the term around more and more- "burn rate burn rate for this..., burn rate that we had thought..., but the burn rate can't be calculated for the future cause we don't know the future...". Now< Tuesday on the Newshour I heard the Whitehouse head of Office of Management and Budget - and he suddenly outed with the term "burn rate" too- giving a sly smile as he said it, as if it is a piece of insider slange that they are letting us in on-. He gave the burn rate as being over 4.2 Billion- somehwat highter than Rummy's 3.9 burn rate even though it was only a couple of days later. And how come none of those news guys ask them about the term "burn rate"?
Just what is it that "burns?" Is that our money? Do they just burn it? Will there be any money to return to me if I am due a tax cut? Is that why they are implementing tax cuts? Because they don't want us to get too mad about the fact that they are just "burning it"? Where are they burning it? Do they have a big bar-b-que in downtown Baghdad where they burn money? Couldn't they just burn oil instead and let me have my money back instead of burning it?? ?

Fourth of July... 2003. More late tree stuff. Went out of the City for a trip to someplace high up where its cool. We settled upon New Paltz ( Neu Pfaltz) as a destination, with a run up to Lake Minnewaska for advanced cooling. As we drove up into the mountains, we discovered the Mountain Laurel are in full bloom- a full month late. This is usually a Memorial Day experience. They are especially full this year, and the floor of the forest looked like it had 3-4 foot drifts of fluffy pink scattered under the trees. The forest gloom surrounding the hiking trails around Lake Minnewaska is lit up by the pink and white blooms, and the meadow we like to hike to was filled with bowers of bloom. People were swimming in the sun warmed lake and the beach was also surrounded with the late Mountain laurel blooms. Even without the Mountain Laurel this is one of the most scenic spots on the East Coast, if not the world.

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Another two hours poured into the black hole of computer hell.
Well I downloaded and installed City Desk, which is Ok but has a headline on it: "My new site" which I did not put in and which I don't want. And, it doesn't have a way to install "comments" that I can find which is the main reason I installed it. So I went to squawkbox.tv which has some type of comment code to slip into your template. Of course I was in Internet Explorer, and on my computer the default lettering for Explorer is something called "Aeterna" so I couldn't read the code. So I went over to Netscape, and simultaneously brought up the blogger.com templates, and squawkbox to get the code in Times New Roman, and tried to install the code, but nothing doing. First, you have to install it between the "head" tags- wherever and what ever they might be. Then- this long ass line of gibberish has to be installed as a single line. So I found something like and installed the code right in alongside the word "head" between the darts. Then I took the other code ( which also had to be installed in a single line) and put it down below, and pressed preview. Voila- no comments and my email address was gone! After a erasing or not preserving my "work" I got my email address back, but could never get the comments thing to appear no matter what. I tried between Head outside the darts, and something else both backwards and frontwards. Asshole Explorer, asshole Aeterna default font ( and how did that get to be the default font I'd love to know?), asshole Netscape, asshole head tags, and especially asshole things that have to be installed as one line, in a small pop up window that can't be resized

Tuesday July 1, 2003. Homeless in NYC ... Had to go to the garden and sit for an hour or so waiting for the exterminator guy to come and check to see if we had a rat problem. J., the 75 year old evicted person, came and sat in the Vegetable Garden under the Fig tree with me to update me on her progress as one of the newly homeless. She saved her rent money when it became clear that eviction was inevitable, and used it to move to a "tourist" hotel on Riverside Drive. I had advised her to take a room in a hotel to relax and get over the horrible eviction experience when I left her off at the Health Department last week to get a TB test, ( a prerequisite to getting into the welfare system in NYC) So it turns out the hotel she checked into is a rent stabilized SRO and she is requesting a lease. She went up to the NY State office building ( DHCR) today to check the rent history on her room and we have our fingers crossed that the rent stabilized rent will be no more than 2 or 3 hundred a month. Not only that- the room is airconditioned, has a private bath, and a refrigerator. If everything checks out, she will have a much nicer place to live for the rest of her life, and will not have to interface with the Welfare system and nosy bureaucrats trying to push her into a "facility." The rent stabilized rent in these places is usually low because the owners illegally converted them to Tourist Hotels in the late eighties. Therefore, the rent is based on the last legally registered tenant's rent back in the late eighties or early nineties. The reason the legal rents are fairly low and affordable is because the last registered tenant lived there for a long time as a resident. After J. left, I turned the Compost until the rat guy appeared. He looked around, but there were no more rats left.