Up 5% on the STARmeter!

I finally made IMDb! Too bad it's a good 20 years after my filmmaking debut (see "The Lost Films of Kit Thompson, her brilliant six NYU short 16mm films." Oh wait, don't bother. They haven't been found yet.)

Snow... and a Shooting

>What a weird week. Yesterday I almost got shot. That is to say, I was near someone who did. I saw it. Well, almost all of it. Enough of it to never want to again. Here's what happened. For some reason, my friend M. and I decided to pick Friday, February 22 to have lunch in midtown. By noon, there was a good six inches of snow on the ground. I gamely got on the subway uptown and had a delightful lunch with M. at Oceana (hamachi appetizer with candied ginger was a highlight.

A lowlight was M. telling me I got fat. Well, he said "gained a lot of weight since high school." Well, duh. And this after LOSING a good ten pounds (with a few more to follow) recently. Note: I was a perfect size 2 in high school. So there. He also said I looked attractive, which almost helps.) But I digress.

After lunch, feeling chilly and melancholy, I walked toward 57th Street as M. had suggested, to see the new Chanel store and other shiny, new (to me) establishments along the high-end block between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Naturally, I accidently turned onto 56th Street and had started up the slight incline when I heard a shot. While wondering if it was a gunshot or a car backfiring I kept going without breaking stride, as any normal New Yorker would.

A few seconds later I could feel something in the air, see people on the other side of the street staring and pointing at a spot in front of me by 20 yards or so and then pointing slowly toward me. Then I saw a young man running right at me, dressed all in black and lugging a large duffel bag. I had plenty of time to contemplate tripping him. It would've been so easy, either with a quick leg out or by jumping out and down in front of him. I'll always regret simply stepping aside, and shielding my face with my little polka-dotted umbrella.

(In a parallel universe I did trip him. The gun flew out of his hand and I grabbed it, turning it on him and shouting "Stay down, motherfucker!" Then I grabbed the bag full of cash, disappeared into the after-lunch rush and ended up at the Apple Store where I bought several MacBook Airs. Oh -- and an iPhone.)

In reality, I turned to watch the perp get to the end of the block (with the bag) and turn right, at the same time noting a black car moving down the block in the same direction, ominously sounding a steady horn.

I kept walking and a few yards away saw a man on the sidewalk bleeding from the head. My heart stopped. I was certain he was dead. It was so Law & Order, except the police hadn't arrived. I stood around with the other gawkers, open-mouthed, horrified... looking/not looking. The police arrived pretty quickly -- within probably two minutes -- and I gave one the perp's description and told them he had turned right on Sixth. Then I left. I got in a cab, finally, and shook uncontrollably all the way home.

Update: the guy got away with around $150,000 that the victim inexplicably (so far) had just withdrawn from a bank. The victim is supposedly in stable condition at the hospital. I'm glad.

My favorite witness statement: "You don't expect this. Not on 56th Street. Especially in front of Starbucks.'' Brilliant.

Read all about it:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/man-is-shot-at-midtown-starbucks-police-say/#comment-207213

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2008/02/22/2008-02-22_man_carrying_150k_attacked_by_gunman_in_.html

Questions, questions

Well, I'm still researching that terrible phrase, "cover off on." I've heard it at least five times now, in meetings at work (conference calls, thankfully, otherwise the utterer would see my dismay/horror). I tried for an answer (see comments on this post) on the only real use on the Web that I found and while the fellow was pleasant, had no derivation for me. Sigh.

Long weekend drawing to a close and I'm no happier than I was before. I did however manage to book a vacation with my sis for late next month. I had wanted to go Cuba but she chickened out so we're going to the Bahamas instead. No biggie. Should be a fun trip, staying at the British Colonial Hilton in Nassau with plans for a snorkeling trip via a catamaran to outer islands and lots of hanging-in-the-hammock-sipping-rum-punch time. Can't wait.

By the way, the picture above isn't "dirty," as my friend A. sniffed. That's just Salsa (female kitten) giving O. Henry an innocent hug.

Update: Oops. Salsa's actually apparently in heat, as I waited too long to get her neutered (will on March 3). So ... maybe not so innocent. I don't know.

San Francisco Again

Jetlag-o-rama! A two-day, two night trip to San Francisco from New York is not recommended. At least by me, anyway. Still jet-lagged three days later. I attended a pretty interesting social media conference that really highlighted the varying degrees of Web 2.0 or whatever capabilities across companies and industries. I presented last (also not recommended) and should have just shut up and poured everyone some much needed coffee. Oh well.

I flew back via LAX and was thrilled with the Virgin America flight. Same... attitude as JetBlue (laid back, mellow, happy) but taken a step further somehow. I was upgraded to Premium class and had legroom that would've made Wilt Chamberlin happy. I also was right behind First class and could see television's Lake Bell (Boston Legal, Surfaces) just beyond the purple-tinted plastic barrier. Star sighting? Close enough.

To be completely honest, it was a little difficult to be there without C., with whom I'd gone not so long ago and had such a wonderful time (driving through the Berkeley Hills, staying in a famous room at the St. Francis, dining in North Beach, etc. Hard to believe that... that was then and this is now.

Another weekend, come and gone

It didn't bode well that the first human contact I had yesterday was with two very tall middle-aged men in my foyer. I knew right away, from the end of the hall, that they were Jehovah's Witnesses. And I was right. They were very pleasant, even when I refused their literature.

Thrilled with the SC outcome, even though I still want M. Dowd for Prez. But Barack will do.

So, movie tonight with S. and dinner (yay). Then more memorizing (presentation for SF trip next week - ugh).

Update: Worst. Movie. Ever. (Untraceable) Better dinner... steak au poivre at Jean-Claude. Yum.

Creepy crawlies

Interesting confluence of non-events. Much like my life to date. Weekend update. Firstly, I trudged to Filene's Basement for a pair of tights and while groveling through the Petite section's 60% racks (who knew!) there was a sudden kerfuffle, a small gasp, a scream, and some indecipherable muttering over by the dressing room area, which I normally avoid like the plague.

It took me a while (loitering in the Junior's sportswear section nearby, where I have no business) to figure out that it was a RAT!!!!

No, it wasn't. It was a.... gigantic cockroach. Which is like 10 times worse. By this time, the screams had reached fever pitch and I was rendered paralyzed near Puma until someone said, "oh, now it's on the wall." I left shortly thereafter.

Earlier, I had watched the History Channel's "Life After Humans," a pretty well done piece of work* (which of course spotlighted our cockroach friends as survivors), so I was able to superimpose Life After Humans onto Filene's Basement, which is pretty cool. Lots of crappy cotton jersey and one-ply cashmere to devour. Not that I myself partake of that shit.

Oh. Two more things. I was reminded -- thinking of the possible rat (see above) of the writers' strike (which makes me think of gigantic blow-up striking rat which made me remember New Year's Eve and the lovely woman I met who actually worked at Troma Films (Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke 'Em High) briefly. How cool and weird!. Just after film school, I interviewed with Troma's Lloyd Kaufman, was offered an impressive $14K a year job, left with a -- well, creepy-crawly feeling -- and never looked back. Looking back now, however, I wonder how differently my life might have turned out.

The road not taken, at any rate, seems as littered with creepy crawlies as the one taken. Now for some tea and Jane Austen. Good night.

* "Life After Humans" also mentioned my beloved home state of Maine (Black Island, precisely) where abandoned stone structures apparently just "melt" after fifty or eighty years, due, in large part, at once to the surprisingly verdant land and the corrosiveness of salt in the air and water.

NH Primary '08

How to get all this down. Hm. Okay, we'll start with my mother, since I started with her. You know, originally. I called her today after the NH primary, waiting precisely 16 hours to make sure she had time to get over her angst and grief re: Obama/Hillary.

And she didn't disappoint, being the funny woman she is. She went through the stages, she said, from feeling like punching someone, to reading the Times -- and specifically Maureen Dowd's "Can Hillary Cry Her Way to the White House?"-- which was apparently the cure to her (Mom's) woe. (I think I forgot a stage or two; sorry Mom.)

Right on, sister. Those tears, man. Genuine? Sure. (And I refuse to see the video.) But acting? Sure. Hill (not my mom) is too smart to have a true moment of private sadness in public. It's hard to fake tears but stress helps alot.

Other talking points via mom:

1) Hillary can't use tears again. Can't can't can't. For the remainder of the primaries. So she used a lethal weapon way too early.

2) Obama IS electable. But only if the right-minded (and I mean left-minded) folks who keep whispering "But do you really see a black man in the White House?" stop it. Just stop it. As a nation, we're highly unlikely to get more progressive and suddenly enlighted, so why are we waiting for the fucking chimera of that future day?

3) I went to bed after the news and fell asleep listening to NPR, heard Obama's speech and thought: he's gotta watch it. He sounded too oratorily (is that a word?) hortatory and leaned a little too far into the preachy rhythms and repetition that bring to my mind a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton. That technique can work but can also be very off-putting. Politics is rhetoric, sure; adding the gloss of the preacherman cadence can effectively tarnish the message. I may be overthinking it, but words and sound are my thing...

4) My mother howled at friend Bob's explanation of the weird discrepancy between the early polling in NH and the outcome. He said that (and I'm totally paraphrasing but it rings SO true to me, having relatives there) that New Hampshirians (is that a word?) hate unsolicited phone calls and, being bombarded with them due to the primary, just started saying whatever. Not lying, per se, but.... whatever. So. There you go.

5) There's certainly still hope. Obama needed a small failure to galvanize his support -- and earlier is better than later.

6) The media suck. Why talk about actual issues and position in depth when they can pant about the horse race? [insert sports metaphor here]

7) Whoever uses "hope" and "change" next in a speech deserves to lose. Hello, get a thesaurus.

8) The nightmare scenario brings it all home: President Huckleberry. We then veered off-course to discuss whether plastic surgery can give us dimples, since they're so effective as a"likeability" factor.

Life in the Holocene

I'm trying to take the long view here, people. We live in the Holocene (which does, unfortunately, sound like Hollow Scene). I'm trying to figure out what the next age is going to be called and when it'll start but I'm not finding it. I'll keep you posted.

Bad news on the fitness front: my new small terrorist cat popped my giant FitBALL™. I only wish I had been there to witness it. And thanks, Salsa, for yet another good excuse not to do sit-ups.

Die Neue Haas Grotesk

Helvetica. Possibly my favorite movie. Not, no, that one would see, it, like, 10 or 2 times, but still. At once a love song and a cutting swipe at a font praised for its "modernity and human-ness" and its "banality and authoritarianism," the documentary is one of the most well done I've seen. I had not read any reviews (just assumed it would be cool) .I'm not going to attempt to be a critic here, but if you love design, philosophy, visual creativity, communication, and humanity -- well. Here you go.

Just a few random notes. The predominantly Swiss and German and male designers interviewed (sigh) all had a single or sometimes double strong vertical line(s) between their eyes like, well, exclamation points, perhaps, from squinting, (that's how you know they're authentic). Thankfully, the vitriol AGAINST Helvetica was proffered with a sense of humor in most cases. The cohesiveness of the movie stemmed from the very font itself: egoless, clean, communicative, and neutral above all else. What came before it, what came after and why -- that's what it's all about. That, and the ubiquity of the font itself, to this day. Bottom line: I laughed ... I cried. 5 stars.

A new crisis. Cat ripped off the Backspace key (oh, look, Helvetica! even though it's not a default font option on my pc or yours) and I'm torn: crazy-glue back on (and all the trouble that can cause*), tap it back on (which makes for MORE mistakes) or leave it off (can I get electrocuted?) and probably get a blood blister on my middle finger after 3 posts) OR just NEVER CHANGE MY MIND AGAIN.

* I once was doing some stupid project probably involving repairing earrings, alone in my large apartment in the East Village, sitting cross-legged on the floor working over a low glass-top and wrought-iron coffee table, not noticing the Crazy Glue pooling just under my forearm and well, suffice it to say, I learned patience that day as my roomate didn't return for hours and even then didn't know how to separate me from the glass. We almost called the Fire Department. And probably should have, as my small scar, nearly two decades later, lingers on.

Sit still, damnit!

And here's O. Henry and proof positive that he simply cannot be photographed properly while he's awake. Maybe I need a special camera or something.

So I had to tell Obama today that he HAS my vote and please stop emailing me. And stop his brother and his wife, too. It's a bit much.

Interesting article in this week's New Yorker about architectural preservation in NYC. Or lack there of. Alack... alas.

New Year's Eve

Fun party in Hell's Kitchen (which, if you ask me, is a little too close to Times Square for comfort, but which definitely has personality -- the apt. of P.'s friend I. is practically above the famed Rudy's bar and would have a view of the ball-drop if it weren't for just one building). Amazing food, including P.'s phenomenal brie pie thing (yum!). Good people. My pictures mostly suck, which means I was having a jolly time*.

Had a small mishap beforehand. I had gotten my nails done the day before (nothing crazy about that; I do it every week or so since I have to keep them short due to contact lenses AND of course current fashion). I had opted sensibily for "Like Linen" color, which is like, um, pale linen color and anyway it looked perfectly fine. Until the next day when suddenly it turned blue-gray and I looked positively cyanotic. Perfect for Halloween. New Year's Eve? Not so much. The undead is NOT a good look for me. So back to the salon on the busiest day of the friggin year. I had to suffer through People, Us, and Star magazines (poor me, I know, but NO ONE brings a book to the salon. I'm serious.)

Good bye, 2007, maybe the worst year ever.

* Which is to say I was feeling a little awful, but only on a sort of sub-atomic level. Hard to explain...

Christmas in Maine

Another nice Christmas in Maine, bordered by easy Jet Blue flights, then three days of good food by the fireside, punctuated by a giant bonfire in the field on the Solstice, as per tradition, and an unfortunate highway muffler-falling-off drama. A foot or two of snow made it all very wintery. J. and I had a wild turkey spotting (see below) but I'm still waiting to see a moose.




I actually flew back on Christmas Day, which didn't bother anyone but my mother who couldn't quite get her head around it. Invited S. and K. over for dinner but realized I had no wine and went walking through the quiet city, ran into R. (from the past) who just because he likes me walked with me up 6th Avenue to 20th Street, over to 8th Avenue and back and down 6th to Union Square East, then down to 8th Street over to Astor Place all to no avail. There simply is no wine on Christmas Day. We then shopped for food and said goodbye until we run into each other again, on my stoop. After a mutually cancelled dinner party, I happily began reading Absurdistan. Fun times.

Back by popular demand

Happy New Year to Bobsy, Val, Jean and Pete and Sasha and O. Henry and Salsa and Ann and Ann and Ann, Stash, Cleo, Nicole, David L., Maura, Nell, Toby, LK, Shannon, Joanne P., Jeff G. Jeff O., Bruce, Betsy, Lily, Alice, Ann, Al, Krista, Casey, Steve, Penny, Carmella, Joan, Bob, Michael O., Michael P., Devin, Ann, Sylvia, Pat, Matt, Joanna, Roberta, Kevin, Philippe, Garrett, Todd L., Mary, Janine, Maura, Steve and Laura, Sayyid, Petra, Kim, Wendy, Kate, Marshall, Torrance, Charlene, Gabriel, JC, Daniel, Al, Margaret, Scott H., David, Kevin, Jonathan, Alice, Adam, Jose, Paul, Lev, Jochen, Hani, Ricky, Ruth, Mary Rae, Rae Ann, Don, Tamar, Richard, Becky, Steve, Steven, Peterson, Andrea, Jim, Doug, Alison, James and Leo.

Qubits: What I've learned so far today

Quantum computation relies on the ability to coherently manipulate the quantum state of qubits. However, unavoidable coupling to the environment gives the qubit a finite lifetime. It has been proposed that the use of a geometric phase (or Berry's phase, a topological phase that accumulates as an object traverses a path) should be more robust to the effects of decoherence. Leek et al. (p. 1889, published online 22 November) describe the observation of this geometric phase in a superconducting qubit, which they claim might bring fault-tolerant quantum computation a step closer. [from Science CiteTrack: This Week In Science e-mail newsletter]

Wikipedia tells me that a qubit is a unit of quantum information. Okay. In addition, "Benjamin Schumacher discovered a way of interpreting quantum states as information. He came up with a way of compressing the information in a state, and storing the information on a smaller number of states. This is now known as Schumacher compression. In the acknowledgments of his paper (Phys. Rev. A 51, 2738), Schumacher states that the term qubit was invented in jest, during his conversations with Bill Wootters.

In other news, unrelated, the purported "Word of the Year"" is "woot"!

I know how to pick 'em

It's been a long time since I'd gone to the movies alone. And maybe longer since I went with anyone. Anyway, I went to Angelika today to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Which was pretty much the perfect movie for today, for me, for now... It was, briefly, a really beautiful experience, not perfect, but visually amazing and mentally motivating. One's (anyone's) personal problems kind of fade away watching a vibrant person transformed into a trapped-in-his-own-body terminal existence. I'm pretty sure all 20 people in the audience were crying. And, like the best movies do, it transported and uplifed. The soundtrack was (Tom Waits, among others) spot on.