Suddenly Summer

Jenn and I kicked off the vacation season this year with a trip to Key West. We had a nice time and did everything we wanted to do, dining at great restaurants, visiting the literary landmarks, and going out on the ocean in sailboats.

The above photo is from Fort Zachary Taylor State Park Beach. Click on it to make it big. Key West isn't known for having great beaches, but Fort Zachary Taylor is quite good, with plenty of palm trees, clean white sand, and gentle waves. The sand is imported from the Bahamas, but who cares.

For a detailed rundown on the trip, visit my three-part series on Jaunted here, and if you'd like to see a detailed video tour of our hotel, read my HotelChatter story here.

Great Accomplishments in Toddlerhood

I got out of work a little bit early on Friday and took Zachary to the playground at McCarren Park in Brooklyn. His latest accomplishment is climbing all the way up to the top of the jungle gym and sliding down the corkscrew slide all by himself. I stayed close to catch him if he slipped, but he didn't need my help. I always used to love those corkscrew slides as a kid. My sister and I used to call them "potato-chip slides" but I can't tell you where that came from.

Rockefeller Center

Jenn and I took Zachary into Manhattan yesterday to meet Jenn's friends Lisa and Arturo and their daughter Amelie, who were in town from New Haven. We had an early dinner at Ruby Foo's in Times Square (not a normal hangout for us, to be sure, but it was good for kids) and then wandered around Rockefeller Center, as they needed to kill an hour before taking the bus back home. The weather was unseasonably warm for late winter. The above photo is not the closeup that it appears to be. I actually shot it from well across the ice skating rink and just cropped it to feature Prometheus. You can click on the photo to make it big.

I like the way Zach is smiling in this picture. He's just now learning to smile for the camera.

You ever see that show 30 Rock? This is 30 Rock, the building, where you'll find NBC Studios and the Rainbow Room. The Top of the Rock observation deck is also up there, though I've never been. It's supposed to be great.

And here's a wider shot of Prometheus and the skaters. Anyway, we all wandered around for a while, and I pointed out the Latvian flag among all the other flags that line the plaza. We sat on a bench for a while and Zachary and Amelie had fun pulling leaves off the bushes and tossing them into the fountain. At first we tried to stop them, but after a while we gave up. In any case, I've always like the Rockefeller Center area for its Art Deco architecture and constant activity. As far as tourist centers of New York City go, it's a much more pleasant place to hang out than, say, Times Square. We stayed for a while and let the kids run around, then Lisa, Arturo, and Amelie went to find their bus, and we took the subway home to Brooklyn.

If you've read this far, then let me take this opportunity to remind you that I write all kinds of stuff for the web. Check out my Jaunted stuff here, my Momondo stuff here, and my old Gridskipper stuff here. Beyond that you can just Google my name and all kinds of stuff will come up. Pass along or share anything that appeals to you. Clicks are good.

Picking Up Zachary from Day Care

It's a lot of work, taking Zachary from our home in Brooklyn to his day care center in Manhattan and back every day, but when you get a nice welcome like this, it's worth it.

Happy 2009!

I shot this photo of the Empire State Building while doing some of my typical last-minute Christmas shopping, rushing to Macy's Herald Square (foreground) during my lunch break to pick up a bottle of Clinique lotion for Jenn. We spent the holiday with Jenn's family in Arizona and came back on the 30th. Our New Year's Eve party last night consisted of me cooking a ribeye steak dinner at home, accompanied by a bottle of red Bordeaux wine from the Bottle Shoppe on Graham Avenue. Zach slept peacefully upstairs as we watched Anderson Cooper looking very uncomfortable co-hosting CNN's Times Square New Year's Eve ball-dropping countdown show with Kathy Griffin. The ball dropped and then it was 2009. Out with the old, in with the new. Today we went to FAO Schwartz, which Zach enjoyed very much.

Sunset at Green Cay

Here's a photo from our recent vacation to Boynton Beach, Florida over the Thanksgiving holiday. We went for a late-afternoon stroll at Green Cay Wetlands (Cay is pronounced "key") and happened to be in the perfect position to catch the sunset. It was November 25, 2008, and this is what it looked like. Click on the photo to make it bigger.

Nota bene: I'm on Twitter now. If you care to follow, my username is VictorOzols. Very creative, I know. You can find my Twitters/tweets/whatever they call that stuff here.

Also, I recently started writing for a travel website called momondo.com, and have a "content channel" called - big surprise - New York City Diary. My Momondo stuff can be found here. Momondo.com is a good place to find cheap airfares, so if you're flying somewhere, give it a look. It might save you some time and money.

And I'm still the weekend editor at Jaunted.com, and here is an archive of my stuff.

Thanks for reading.

The East River and Manhattan from Java Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Here's a photo I took last night at around 6:30 p.m. I was at the end of Java Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, looking out over the East River to Manhattan. I have a rather cheap and old digital camera, but I used the "night shot" setting and was able to get kind of a neat photo out of the situation by resting the camera on a Jersey barrier so it would stay still while the shutter was open.

I think the ambient moisture in the air (it started pouring down rain a few minutes after this photo) captures the city lights over the water in a nice way. Click on the photo to make it big.

By the way, the East River isn't really a river at all, it's a tidal estuary. And I think the old stories about mob guys putting their adversaries into concrete shoes and dumping them into the East River is a myth. You'd have to stay still for a long time for the concrete to harden. It hardly seems worth the hassle.

An Interview with Jacques Piccard, 1922-2008

[Photo via AP]

I'm saddened to read that Jacques Piccard died today. Jacques Piccard was a Swiss oceanic engineer famous for making the deepest ever ocean dive, which he accomplished on January 23, 1960 along with Lt. Don Walsh. The two entered a bathyscaph called Trieste and descended 10,916 meters (35,810 feet) into the Challenger Deep, an area in the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench, touching down on the deepest part of the ocean anywhere on earth. That's quite an accomplishment, and one that hasn't yet been repeated.

I had the good fortune to interview Mr. Piccard by telephone back in 2005 and ask him what it was like to descend to the deepest part of the ocean. The interview never made it to print, so I will take this opportunity to publish it here, in its entirety. It could probably use some editing, but it's nice to hear the rhythms of his French-accented speech, and I wouldn't want to take out anything important. Also, I want to post it in a timely fashion. I'll probably post a link to it on Jaunted.com tomorrow as well.

Please read and enjoy it.

Interview with Jacques Piccard

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Okay, yeah, sure

Okay, please you will excuse me but my English is relatively poor.

Our base was in Guam.

And until we could arrive to the place, precise place of the Mariana Trench where we were to descend, to dive, we had about four days to tow the submarine with a tugboat and the sea was pretty rough, and it was not a very nice trip. It was interesting of course, everybody was looking forward to making the deep dive, but the weather was relatively poor.

And when we arrived on the 23^rd of January [1960], the early morning, we arrived at the place, we had to start the dive as soon as possible because the waves were bad and the sea was very rough, windy, some rain also I believe, and so on.

But the first impression was as soon as we started the dive, being in the bathyscaphe, even just a few feet below the water level it was absolutely quiet and smooth and no waves anymore, you know, and so we could really start diving in very good spirits.

And looking through the portholes, the water seemed empty, no fishes of course because there are very rarely fishes on the surface of the sea in the middle of the ocean, the Pacific.

But the blue of the light was absolutely beautiful, clear and limpid and absolutely beautiful water.

So we start to dive, relatively slowly first, and, due to the physics of the bathyscaphe, normally when you dive you dive faster and faster, it is what happened.

And in order to control our speed and temperature you remember the Trieste was made with a sphere in which we were protected from the pressure of the water.

And the sphere was heavier than water, it was fixed to a container of gasoline, light gasoline which gives buoyancy for coming up after the dive, you know?

So we had to control the temperature of the gasoline, which was very important to know that everything was smooth.

The temperature in the gasoline was slowly increasing due to the compression of the gasoline.

And so everything was smooth, so we, after a few minutes we arrived to about 1,000 feet it was already darker, and then, gradually, as soon as we were continuing the dive the water was darker and darker, and when we arrived to approximately 600 meters which is about 2,000 feet we were really in the depths because it was completely night, you know.

We had searchlights so we could use our searchlights to try to see some (spheres?), there was some plankton in the water, not very much but we could see some light snow, you know, snow which was going up as we were going down, you know. Relatively speaking, the plankton which was remaining at the same depth continuously was appeared to be coming up.

So it was interesting to see but nothing special. We were used to dives, Don Walsh had dived previously. Everything was smooth so we could keep in touch by telephone with the surface. We said everything is fine, we are now at 2,000 feet, 3,000 feet, 10,000 feet, I believe even deeper to 20,000 feet.

But when we arrived at approximately 4,000 meters, 15,000 feet about, then the telephone stopped. The telephone could not reach the tugboat, the surface boat, so we were absolutely alone, by ourselves, we had no way to communicate with the surface.

This was an interesting point. We knew at least we could even say that the telephone was going until 4,000 meters, the telephone was going maybe better than what we could normally expect. So the communication was good until these 4,000 meters.

Then we continued, we arrived to 5,000 meters, 6,000 meters, maybe I can speak in meters? Everybody is knowing that about three feet is making one meter.

So we continued to dive and when we arrived at 10,000 meters approximately we could hear kind of a “fok” noise, and a small movement, a little bit like a very small, little earthquake. We didn’t know what it was so I stopped the bathyscaphe, to take a few minutes for thinking about this noise.

And I told to Walsh, you see, if when we will start to dive again if we are going very fast it would be showing that we are losing gasoline, which would be extremely dangerous, of course.

If, on the contrary, the bathyscaphe is starting to dive again very very slowly, it means that our equilibrium is good, and that “fok” that we felt in the dive was of relatively no importance of all. This is what happened really.

Then we continued to dive. Finally we arrived to approximately 11,000 meters, 35,600 feet at that time.

And 200 meters below us on our fathometer, we could see the bottom. And it was important because some oceanographers had told us that maybe it would not be a real bottom, it would be just more and more sedimentation, or ooze in the water with the possible danger that we would enter into the mud too deep and then not see anything more, and stay in the mud, which would not be bad because by dropping some ballast we could always make the submarine lighter and come up to the surface.

But seeing on the fathometer a beautiful straight line on the bottom, it showed that the bottom was clear, that it was practically, probably no stone, no rocks and so on, and that the mud was sufficiently resistant so that we could really land on this kind of bottom.

So I slowed down the submarine and made it very very light in the water, just a few pounds more than the water, and so we went down and down very very slowly and finally at 35,800 feet we touched the bottom. Very slowly, didn’t make any clouds.

You know, if you land on sand or on ooze if you land too fast you can make a big cloud and you don’t see anything more for a few minutes.

But on the contrary the landing was so slow, so perfect I can say, that the bottom was not disturbed at all. We could finally look through the porthole, we could finally see the bottom on the deepest-known place in the earth, in the sea.

Another thing which was extremely important and very interesting. No oceanographer at the time could know with precision if very well complicated, well-organized life was living on the bottom. In other words, are there fish living there, or if no fish maybe some shrimps and so on.

So for fun, one oceanographer would remain on the surface, of the sea, it was Dr. Rechnitzer, told me before the dive “I prohibit, I tell you, you are not allowed to come up to the surface if you don’t see at least one fish,” you know, just to show it was important to look carefully.

Of course we looked very carefully but it was very simple.

When we arrived at the bottom, just at about ten or 15 feet from the porthole, we saw a fish which was at first absolutely not moving at all, and after a few minutes he started to move and to swim, very slowly, and to disappear in the darkness a few feet farther.

And this was very, very interesting, you know, because a fish living like this in the bottom of the sea of course is using oxygen for breathing. And this oxygen was, of course, in the water, and where was it coming from?

It could come only from the surface, because on the surface you have the (phytoplanktons??), or the vegetable planktons, making oxygen, producing oxygen, and the waves, taking oxygen from the air, or taking air from the atmosphere, and, by current, this oxygen finally arrived to the deepest place in the ocean.

And then, also, if you have water coming from the surface, maybe after several years of voyage, of course, this new water will push the old water away, and this water will finally arrive back to the surface.

So you can imagine it is a kind of a movement from water from the surface coming down to the bottom of the sea, and back to the surface, and so on. These are cycles which can take scores and scores of years, of course.

But it was very important, because, at that time, many people, scientists, also, and politicians, economists, economic people, and so on, said what can we do with the refuse, I believe you say, of the nuclear power, energy. What is the word? The product which has a radioactive, and which are coming out of nuclear …

VO: Nuclear waste?

Nuclear waste, that’s the word, thank you very much. So people said, oh nuclear waste, we can drop them in the deep trenches and then they would stay there forever.

And no, we said no, it’s not true, this fish practically told us that we are not to drop any nuclear waste in the bottom of the trenches, because we know that the water is finally coming back to the surface, and all the sea would be damaged, all the oceans and so would be damaged by the nuclear waste.

So this was quite clear and as far as I know no nuclear waste has been dropped on this bottom, in these places. Unfortunately there are many other places where they do this which is also very bad, but at least this water at least for now is protected.

So this was what this fish explained us, told us I can say.

How was the fish? It was nothing special. Not at all like the deep sea fish that you can see in the dictionary, encyclopedia and so on and so on.

It was a flat fish, about looking like a sole, not more than one foot at the most in length and about half in wide.

And it was a flat fish and it was important to know it was a flat fish because are usually living on the bottom, so this fish was living on the bottom of the trench.

It was not a fish that we would have, for instance, (trained/trailed?) with water with the submarine from mid-water or from the surface,

No it was a fish really living on the bottom. In other words, the deepest part of the fish, the part which was below the fish was in the mud, and we could see only the top of the fish if I can say so. A flat fish living in the mud, half the body in the mud and half the body in the water let’s say.

And the two eyes, typical from these animals, with the two eyes on the same side of the head, were clearly visible.

VO: Like a flounder?

Exactly like a flounder, exactly like a flounder, very similar to a flounder. Might be a flounder. To be sure, our observations which were relatively short, of course, we had other things to do, to be sure that this observations were good we should really make more dives, and continue to dive several times to see other fishes and so on.

This is a dream that I am too old to realize that myself. But sooner or later other people will make use of marine for great depths, new bathyscaphes will certainly make other dives at these places.

I can also tell you that the Japanese people are using the remote control instruments, and they have been approximately in the same area that the place where we landed and they found and described the bottom of the sea exactly as we saw it.

But up to now apparently they didn’t see any fishes yet.

So this is the story of the dive, well, an important point is, I told you that until about 12,000 feet the telephone did function very well, it was an acoustical telephone with no cable of course, like radio however by waves instead of being by cable. A telephone that you could use normally.

Excuse me, I wasn’t very clear, and we had no cable, no electric cable, no cable at all between the surface boat and the submarine.

We were absolutely free and the telephone was only going by using ultra, ultrawaves, ultrasound, you have a word in English? Ultrasound, exactly yes.

So, being at the bottom, we said we’ll try the submarine (phone) you never know, maybe it will work again. And we called the surface, “this is the Trieste, we are down at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, how do you hear us?”

And you know the sound took approximately seven seconds to go to the surface, and seven seconds to go back again for the answer, so we could not have any answer before 14 seconds.

And just after 14 seconds we heard the surface “Hello, Trieste, wonderful. How are you, we are glad to hear you, communication is quite good,” and so on and so on.

So that was the telephone which was not working at 5,000 meters was apparently working at (??) meters.

Why? This was simple to explain. The surface boat was not still on the surface. It was moving, going for a few miles on east and west and north and south and so on. And the communication was good, whatever the depth was, just when the surface boat was on the vertical of the submarine.

Then the waves could go very well. But if the surface boat was too far away, it was a reflection, a refraction?? Of the wave, and nothing could arrive to the antenna of the boat.

So, by chance the surface boat, the tugboat and the small, other Navy boats which were there to help us, by chance they were just on the vertical of the submarine when we were on the bottom.

So we could speak and tell them where we were, what we were doing, and so on. And also we could tell them in advance, I told them we will arrive at 4:00 this afternoon, and I believe we arrived at two minutes before four, so just practically exactly what was expected and computed.

So this is the story of our dive. I am just sorry that nobody did it again after this, after us, but as I told you before this will come certainly.

VO: Okay, well what was it like when you finally got back up to the surface and you got out of the Trieste. How was your homecoming up on the surface?

Oh, this was also interesting. We had two portholes on the Trieste, one forward, one backward. And on the one backward, aft, the windows, porthole was on the door, we could open or close, we could close it when we start to dive, we open when we arrive at the surface, and this is in a little chamber which is full of water.

And which is on the same pressure as the water itself. So in order to close this small chamber called antichan ??? or small chamber we had a panel of Plexiglas which was about one inch and a quarter thick. And this panel, for some reason too long to explain now, could not stand some kind of tension, and although the pressure was the same inside and outside this little chamber, it was some crack that which was the noise that we heard before that I told you.

It was a crack maybe about half a foot, a few inches long. And we saw, we discovered this small crack when we were down on the bottom, and when we came up, due to the lower and lower pressure, the window closed. The small crack disappeared, it remained but it was completely tight again, watertight again.

So when we arrived on the surface I had to blow with compressed air the entrance tube. And when I blow the compressed air I decided to do it slowly so it would not increase too much the pressure inside, so that full panel could not be destroyed by the inside pressure due to the compressed air. I hope you understand what I mean?

So for this I opened the compressed air with the bottle we had inside the sphere, very slowly, and normally we make empty the entrance tube from this water, in a few minutes. Due to the fact that I was doing it very slowly it took I believe ten minutes, I don’t remember, ten or twelve minutes probably. And at that time the telephone did not work again because the antenna was out of the water. So I could not explain to the surface crew that we had to wait ten minutes or fifteen minutes so that we could open the hatch and get out.

So we did it very slowly, and the people there on the surface, unfortunately, believed it was some accident, maybe we are no more alive and so on.

They were slightly afraid until we could finally open the hatch and get out of the submarine.

Union Pool Car Show

Over the weekend, Jenn, Zachary and I went for a walk in McCarren Park as we often do. On the way back we noticed a classic car show taking place under the elevated portion of the BQE so we decided to check it out. As we were walking by the car in the above photo, it started spewing out flames from two stacks coming out of the hood, so I had to shoot it.

The next picture is of a car I thought looked cool, but I can't recall the make or model.


The car show was somehow affiliated with a bar called Union Pool. I haven't been there in years, but it's become very popular with the hot rod crowd.

Sunday at the Pool

This afternoon, after I finished my entries for Jaunted, Jenn went into Manhattan to meet a friend, so I put Zachary in the jogging stroller and went to McCarren Park. I could hear music from the McCarren Park Pool, so we headed over to check out the free show. The performer was a rapper/hip-hop artist named Aesop Rock who was joined by Rob Sonic and DJ Whiz. I hadn't heard of the first two, but I think I met DJ Whiz one time at a club called Good World, but that's going back a ways and it might not be the same Whiz. In any case, the music was pretty good, and Zach liked looking at all the people and especially the inflatable dancing stick figures.

After a few minutes at the concert, we headed over to a quieter part of the park so I could let Zachary run around on the grass and kick his little soccer ball. On the way I bought a soft-serve vanilla ice cream cone.

He enjoyed the ice cream cone and, naturally, got ice cream all over his face. Then we found a patch of grass and played some rudimentary soccer. Zach got distracted by a rock and then kept kicking the ball to a group of women relaxing on a blanket who were all taken in by the young charmer.

Today Was a Good Day

Jenn is out with her mom seeing South Pacific on Broadway, and I just put Zachary to bed, so I finally have a moment to myself. Tchaikovsky is on the radio, and it's pleasant enough outside to leave the windows open instead of cranking up the air conditioner. It's Friday night and I can finally take a breath. Let me savor that for a second, because I've been working hard. Deep breath ...

Today was a good day. The weather was nice. Work was fine. We gathered by the window to watch a big balloon rise above Central Park. I left at 6:00 p.m. on the dot and raced downtown to Chelsea to pick up Zachary from day care, then continued on to Brooklyn. Zachary was happy and giggly on the subway, making friends out of strangers as he always does. We dropped by the grocery store on the way home and bought some seltzer.

Okay, I also bought some beer. Radeberger Pilsner. Big bottles only cost $1.99 there. I'm sipping one now and it's delicious. If you're reading this and feel compelled to race over to C-Town right now and buy some, forget it. I bought the last four bottles. Sorry.

As soon as we got home, I put the beer and seltzer in the 'fridge and very quickly changed out of my work clothes and into shorts, sneakers, and a t-shirt. Then I grabbed Zachary's sippy cup and jogging stroller, and we made our way out to McCarren Park. It was 7:30 when we finally got rolling. The sun was still up, but wouldn't be for much longer. I jogged to the park while Zach relaxed in the stroller and enjoyed the ride.

Once we got there, it was a surreal experience that you can only have in New York. So many different, interesting things were going on that I almost envied Zachary's perspective on it at just 20 months of age.

Here's what was going on at the park tonight:

I could hear the music coming from McCarren Park Pool about two blocks away. It turned out to be a band I had never heard of called Ween. We didn't go in, of course, but you could hear the music just fine by the soccer field and jogging track, where we were hanging out. Ween sounded pretty good, like an outdoor summertime concert should.

We jogged a lap around the track. On one end was a group of Latin American dancers doing some kind of native dance. A drummer was keeping time, and some of them were wearing indigenous striped wool outfits. I'm not sure where they were from exactly but I'll guess Bolivia or Guatemala or someplace that still has strong pre-Hispanic traditions. Zach and I stopped to watch the dancers.

On the eastern corner was a dreadlocked personal trainer we know named Kiki. He was leading a class so I didn't bother him, but he is always nice to Zach ("How you doing, my brother? All right, my brother.") We wouldn't know Kiki if it weren't for Zach, who is amazingly deft at arranging introductions.

On the southern apron of the track was a group of break dancers getting ready for one of their regular outdoor dance sessions. They were just getting warmed up, but Zach and I have seen them dancing up a storm a few times recently. It's always a cool scene: somebody brings a boom box with the latest dance mix, and people take turns on the linoleum, popping and spinning and body rocking and other terms I'm not familiar with. Some of them are quite good and it's fun to watch.

In the brand new luxury apartments above them, the contestants from the latest Top Chef show were moving in to 20 Bayard. Jenn loves that show. I'll admit I've watched it with her a few times.

I rolled the stroller onto an open strip of grass and let Zach run free. The sun was just setting like a big fireball sinking behind Manhattan. Two soccer teams were battling it out on the field in front of us. The music from the concert washed over us. I tried to take Zach's picture but he kept turning away. We both savored the moment and then it was time to head back home.

A Weekend in Brooklyn

We live in Brooklyn, but I manage to get into Manhattan just about every day. During the week, that's simple enough, since that's where my job is, but on the weekends I generally find a reason to cross the East River as well, like karate, shopping, or meeting friends. But this weekend I've hardly left the neighborhood, let alone the borough, because I was at home doing work.

I recently picked up a gig as weekend editor at a travel website called Jaunted, and it took a while for me to figure out the format, HTML coding, etc. All in all I think it went well, and you can read my entries on Jaunted.com. You can find an archive of my Jaunted stuff so far here.

The site I used to write for, Gridskipper, was recently relaunched in a different format, and I figured it was a good time for me to make a change. But my Gridskipper archive is still up, and can be found here. I'm not sure all the map posts work yet, and the comments that had accrued during the site's previous incarnation have been wiped out, but most everything else is there, the hits as well as the misses.

Anyway, I didn't leave Brooklyn this weekend, but this afternoon Jenn, Zach and I did leave Williamsburg. We took a walk to Greenpoint, a charming Polish community in north Brooklyn. I deposited a check at the bank, and Jenn bought some Polish candy at the candy store pictured below on Manhattan Avenue.

I'm especially fond of the hazelnut chocolates. As we were walking home, it started raining, so we finished our walk with a jog. Fortunately, we had the jogging stroller, if not good jogging shoes.

Panda Face Cookies Part VIII

For those of you who have been waiting since March 20, 2006 for a panda face cookie update, I apologize. In that time, a great many panda face cookie cartoons have passed through our home unblogged about, I'm afraid. There's just not that much time in my life to keep up with it. But Jenn offered me this one today, and it cries out for translation. Here's the full cartoon (click on the photo to make it bigger):

The best I can guess is that the music the panda is listening to suddenly brings him to some big insight or epiphany, and it's probably related to being made of chocolate. Anyway, if anyone out there speaks Japanese and cares to translate in the comments, I'd appreciate it. Here's a close-up of the final panel:

A Day in New York

Sunday was Father's Day, which meant I could do whatever I wanted and Jenn and Zachary had to go along with it. We packed Zach into the stroller and headed down to Pier 40 in Manhattan for a spot of late-morning kayaking on the Hudson River.
The free walk-up kayaking program is great. You just show up at the pier and they give you a kayak to paddle around. Since Zach is still too little to take out on a boat, Jenn and I took turns in the water. She went first.

While Jenn was on the water, I tried to keep Zach entertained. He was rambunctious and full of energy. He was excited to spot his mom in a kayak, bobbing up and down as the waves came in and out of the embayment, and we waved to her from the pier. Then he had a long drink from his sippy cup.
After Jenn got back, it was my turn in the water.
I had fun paddling in circles and feeling the motion of the ocean, but it started raining so I cut my cruise short and we headed to the subway. Zach tried on my hat.
Back at home, we put Zach to bed and had a snack, and then I took a little nap myself. Naps are always nice. When we both woke up, the three of us went out to our local park, McCarren Park. We noticed something going on in the McCarren Park Pool, so we went to check it out.
It turned out to be an art show called the Renegade Craft Fair.
The fair was a collection of hip clothing, artwork, and knickknack vendors who were lined up in white tents inside the disused public swimming pool. Jenn bought Zach a tee shirt with a guitar on it. I bought Jenn a juice made from lemons and cucumber. It was a lackluster juice, but the fair was cool.
We took a lap around the pool and then headed back to the house. Jenn and Zach continued on to the grocery store, while I got some work done at home. Later, when Zach was asleep, we had chili, corn, peas, and bread for dinner. We toasted a very happy Fathers Day with a cold beer.

New Yorkers in Miami Beach

We've been back from Miami Beach a week now, and I've been so busy catching up on work that I haven't had a chance to post an update. But I have written a couple of things for other websites that will give you an idea at how our trip was. (It was great.)

You can find a post I wrote about Miami Beach for Gridskipper right here.

And you can enjoy a review of Kobe Club Miami that I wrote for BlackBook right here.

And here's an archive of all my Gridskipper stuff, if you'd like to catch up.

I'm going to bed.

First Day of Spring 2008

Welcome, spring. So nice to finally see you again.

The vernal equinox occurred at 1:48 a.m. today, ushering in the most hopeful of seasons.

I shot this photo from my "rear window." This is what back alleys in my part of Brooklyn look like on the first day of spring.

Nonstop Excitement

I've been awfully busy of late, working morning, noon, and night, but I do still find time for the important things in life. Like scrubbing the bathroom! Over the long weekend, I cleaned our upstairs bathroom from top to bottom, scouring the stains off the bathtub through backbreaking labor and the liberal use of bleach. Don't worry, the window was open and Zach was nowhere near. After all was rinsed and dried, I had to show off the clean bathroom to Zach, and this was his reaction.

Roll Down, Roll Up

Well, I didn't see it coming, but the Good Day Dance is officially sweeping the city. From the trendiest Chelsea nightclubs to gritty, outer-borough dance halls, everybody's doing it. The ladies push right, and then push left, as if holding a broom. Guys are responsible for first rolling down, then rolling back up (as if spooling some yarn), and finishing by clapping their hands. Don't try everything all at once. Take it slow, one move at a time. You'll get it.

An Elephant in McCarren Park Pool

I happened upon an elephant while I was walking with Zachary in McCarren Park this afternoon. Elephants are somewhat rare in Brooklyn, so I went back to the house and grabbed my camera. As you may know, the McCarren Park swimming pool hasn't had water in it for decades, but over the past five years or so it has become a venue for movies, concerts, and, apparently, elephants. Click on any of these photos to make them big like elephant. Here's a wide shot.

I had taken Zachary to the playground at the end of the park and pushed him in a swing for a few minutes, but he got tired of swinging, so I strapped him back in the Ergo and strolled around the park. I walked to the fence at the end of the playground to see what was going on in the pool, and sure enough, there was this big elephant. Here's a close-up.


Now, you may be wondering why there was an elephant in the McCarren Park Pool. If you're wondering this, you probably don't live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. An artsy neighborhood like this has weird stuff going on all the time, and I really wasn't that surprised to see it. But it was there for a specific purpose, one which I will only partially divulge, because I respect the concept of what they're doing. In short, the elephant is part of a film that will be screened in an art museum. Here's one more photo:

As for what the film is about, I have to say I'm a little bit proud of myself for guessing it so quickly. As Zachary and I looked through the fence, I noticed somebody standing near the elephant that immediately reminded me of certain parable involving an elephant. My suspicion was confirmed later when I spoke to a guy who was guarding the entrance. That's the topic of the film.

Anyway, the filmmakers probably want to keep it on the down low, and I'd rather not be the guy who divulges the secret. Others might, in fact there are probably a few dozen other Williamsburg residents blogging about the elephant right now, but I'm just happy that I was able to show Zachary his first elephant today.

And it was a majestic elephant, tall and gray and friendly seeming (it didn't stomp on anybody). I enjoyed looking at the elephant today, and was impressed at what a big and magnificent creature it was. Anyway, I just wanted to share my elephant tale. Now it's back to work for me. Oh, one more thing. The elephant was from Commerford Zoo in Goshen, Connecticut, at least according to the truck it arrived in.

Virginia Vacation

Jenn, Zachary and I recently took a mini-vacation in Virginia, which is where I'm from originally. We flew down to D.C. from LaGuardia and dropped Zach off with my parents in Stafford, Virginia. We spent a night there, and then drove to Virginia Beach for a couple of days of sun and fun. Unfortunately, it rained almost the entire time, so it was all fun, no sun, but that's the way it goes. We had a good time anyway.

I went to Old Dominion University as an undergrad. Since ODU is located in Norfolk, Virginia, which is on the way to Virginia Beach, Jenn and I stopped there to take a look at the old campus. ODU has changed so much since I graduated, with lots of fancy-looking new buildings along the main drag of Hampton Boulevard. I remember there used to be a strip of crappy bars with names like Friar Tuck's and 4400 Club. Actually, Friar Tuck's was kind of fun on Sunday nights (I recall getting greyhounds on dollar drink nights), but "44" was a typically awful den of frat-rock silliness. We drove past my old dormitory, Rogers Hall, which looks more or less the same, except now they have a dock on the water. One time a guy I knew on the hall threw an empty vodka bottle out his window and smashed the windshield of a car parked below. I don't condone such behavior. Anyway, then we drove through the Powhatan neighborhood and past the dorm of the same name. It was pretty much as I remembered it. It had been fifteen years.

Then we took a walk across the commons. It was raining, but not hard. Here's a photo of the main campus area, which is more or less unchanged. Click to enlarge.

And here's a shot of the much-expanded student center. I had a radio show on the campus radio station, WODU, and the studios were in this building. Those were good times. Jenn and I walked through the center and through the bookstore, but didn't buy anything. There actually used to be a rathskeller in Webb Center, but I imagine that's long gone.

Here's a photo of a fountain with a statue of the ODU mascot, the Monarch. In this case, a Monarch is a lion, not a butterfly. How could a butterfly play basketball? A lion, on the other hand, makes an excellent basketball player.

They started building a Maglev train that was supposed to shuttle students across the campus, but it was never finished, and now stands idly by. Kind of sad. Here's a story about how and why it failed.

So we left ODU and drove around the parts of Norfolk I remembered, including my old neighborhood of Ghent, which was really the nicest part of the city. We cruised past my old apartment on Princess Anne, saw the grassy areas of Stockley Gardens which flooded one time while I lived there, and I remember a guy in a kayak padding up the street. I had never been in a flood before, and fortunately my building was spared. The water receded after a couple of hours.

We went up and down Colley Avenue, which is like a downtown street from from some turn of the century small American town. It's funny, because at the time it seemed like that was the place to go, with trendy restaurants like Elliot's drawing the sophisticated crowd. Living in New York City as long as I have now, it seemed awfully small and quiet. Jenn and I enjoyed a nice lunch at a restaurant called Kelly's, which was one of the few places from "back in the day" that's still there. (Colley Cantina is the other, along with the Naro theater and Donut Dinette.) I remember that there was sort of a rivalry between Kelly's and Elliot's across the street (though Elliot's was by far the more posh of the two). There was even graffiti in the restroom of Kelly's that said "Flush twice, it's a long way to Elliot's." I checked to see if that graffiti was still there, but it was not.

So I did my reminiscing, and then we hit the road for Virginia Beach. More on that soon.

Hudson River Kayak Adventure

Today Jenn and I did something we've wanted to do for a long time: we went kayaking on the Hudson River from a pier in downtown Manhattan. It was great.

There are several kayak outfitters on the river, but the New York City Downtown Boathouse offers free walk-up kayaking. Yes, absolutely free, though if you're cool you'll put some money in their donation box. This volunteer organization wants to get people involved with ecologically-friendly river activities such as kayaking, so they allow people to borrow kayaks and paddle around in an area between two large piers. The catch is, you can only go out for 20 minutes, and you have to stay within the defined area. But there's plenty of room to paddle around comfortably if you're a novice, and, unless there's somebody waiting to go after you, they'll usually let you stay out on the water longer.

If you really enjoy your introductory kayak adventure, you can sign up for longer trips, included guided kayak tours to Coney Island, the Tappan Zee Bridge (a 50-mile round trip), and the famous Manhattan Circumnavigation.

So this morning I strapped Zach into the baby carrier and Jenn, Zach, and I took the subway to Houston Street, then walked west to Pier 40, on the Hudson River. The kayak place is on the south side of the pier, about half way out.

We initially weren't going to do it this weekend, since we couldn't get a babysitter, or rather, today wasn't the day to shell out the dough for a sitter. But we figured one of us could watch Zachary while the other went out in a kayak and then do a baby hand-off, and it worked out just fine. Zach was very well-behaved and happy to be out with his parents on a nice day.

Jenn went first for about a half-hour in total, and then I got to go out for about the same amount of time. It was fantastic. The weather was beautiful, and the water was just a little wavy, enough to give that feeling of the motion of the ocean that stays with you throughout the day. I can still kind of feel the waves as I sit here at my desk. Up and down, up and down.

The views of lower Manhattan and even Jersey City from the water were great. Neither of us came close to capsizing, though one guy did it on purpose to practice capsize recovery techniques. As you can see from the photos (click to make them big), these are open-top ocean kayaks, so it's not like you'd get stuck upside down if you didn't know how to right yourself, you'd just get dumped out.

Anyway, it's been written about before, and I've even blogged about it for another site, but now I've actually done it and can say definitively that New York kayaking is one of the coolest and cheapest things you can do on a summer weekend.

Pizza Slice = Subway Fare

I've lived in New York City a dozen years now, and in that time I've noticed a few things. One of the things I've noticed, being a big pizza eater and subway rider, is that the price of a slice of plain, cheese pizza from your standard neighborhood pizzeria is almost always the same price as a single ride on the subway.

When I first moved to New York in November 1994 one subway token was $1.25, and so was a slice of pizza. Then, in 1995, the fare went to $1.50, and within weeks, pizza did the same. Now we use MetroCards, which do offer volume discounts, but the price of a single ride is $2, and a standard slice of pizza is also $2. As the New York kids say, "Yo, let me get a slice."

Well, get ready for another subway fare increase. My local pizza shop, Sal's Pizza on Lorimer Street in Brooklyn, recently raised the price of a plain slice to $2.25. I wonder how long it will take for the subway fare to catch up. The funny thing is, the very next morning after I found out about Sal's pizza price increase, I heard on the radio some news story about how the MTA is starting to make noise about another fare hike. I smiled.

Has anybody else noticed the pizza/subway parity? How far do you think it goes back?

Yankee Stadium 2007

On Friday night, Jenn and I got a sitter for Zachary and headed up to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. We were there to meet our friends Jen (one n) and Will, who were kind enough to offer us a pair of extra tickets to the game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Unfortunately, the Yankees got beaten pretty handily that night, and we left at the bottom of the fifth inning (Jen and Will left even earlier than that). But we still enjoyed ourselves, and I sipped a watery $8 Miller Light and Jenn munched on a yummy $6 frankfurter. Good times.

Our seats were located very close to the left field foul pole, and that's left fielder Hideki Matsui in the center of the photo at the top of this entry. I like Matsui. Watching a game on TV has many advantages, but only when you're at the ballpark do you get an appreciation of how big the field is, especially the outfield. On TV it sometimes seems like every ball hit in the park is catchable, but when you're at the stadium it's clear just how far guys like Matsui have to run to make those amazing plays. Also, there's nothing like a foul ball or a home run ball coming your way to get your heart pumping. Just don't spill that $8 beer.

Ironically, while the Yankees got trounced on Friday, when we happened to be in attendance at the stadium, they took both games of a double header on Saturday, went on to win on Sunday, and won tonight as well. Perhaps it's best if I stay home and watch on TV. My presence in the Bronx doesn't seem to help the team.


I snapped this photo on the way out of the stadium as we headed to the subway. It's the beginning stages of the new Yankee Stadium, which is supposed to be ready for the 2009 season. Maybe I'll have better luck there.