Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Brooklyn

  • Death to Tribeca

    The title is too flippant. The video is too powerful.

    Behind me, a filled room of 9/11 first responders. And in front of me, a nearly empty Congress. Sick and dying, they brought themselves down here to speak — to no one.

    It’s shameful.

    I’m obviously biased as a New Yorker and a World Trade Center worker who went to too many funerals after 9/11, but watch at least one of these videos.

    This is the full video (if you want to get the title reference)

    https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1138511207080611840

    This is a good shorter summary:

    https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1138551630335488000

     

     

  • NYC Evolution

    This may be mostly interesting to New Yorkers, but I enjoyed this video which animates the growth of New York from the initial settlements to today. I thought the pace of the video was too slow so I recommend running it at double speed:

    Details on this project here.

  • Pigeons are Fast

    Who knew? As a city dweller, I generally consider pigeons dirty creatures. Yet they are smart (from the London Review of Books):

    Pigeons are more intelligent than we give them credit for, one of the few animals — along with great apes, dolphins and elephants — able to pass the mirror self-recognition test. If you mark a pigeon’s wing and let it look in a mirror it will try to remove the mark, realising that what it sees is a reflected image of its own body.

    and fast:

    They can fly extremely fast – up to 110 miles per hour – and with a following wind can cover 700 miles in a single uninterrupted flight (pigeons don’t like to fly at night but can be trained to do so). There are faster birds – peregrine falcons, the pigeon’s main predator, can reach 200 miles per hour on the stoop – but none can fly horizontally, under its own power, as quickly as a pigeon.

    I also only have three free articles this fortnight…

    Screenshot_20190422-182536

  • The Edge

    The view from the soon to be complete observation deck on the 100th floor is somewhat frightening. Not sure how I feel about looking straight down…

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  • So Cold

    I was in Atlanta Tuesday for their horrible storm that they closed schools and government offices for. Horrible, it rained for about an hour. Bonus was that traffic was super light since everyone stayed home.

    But the last two days in the Midwest and Northeast were seriously cold. Reminding multiple people of this:

    cold_2x

    I grew up in Wisconsin and it was way colder. And get off my lawn…

  • Pleasant Afternoon at the DMV

    No, really.  I had to renew my license. I made an appointment online. It told me all the documentation I needed. I got a bar code emailed to me to print out and bring with.

    I showed up and the place looked fairly chaotic:

    img_20181009_145955

    But I scanned my bar code and got a ticket. They said listen/look for your number. It was called in less than a minute. I went to window 13. He checked my documents quite thoroughly, then handed them back with another piece of paper and said go to window 26 to get your picture taken and then come back. I walked right up to window 26 and my picture was taken. I came back to 13 and waited about a minute while he helped someone else. Then he took my credit card payment, handed me a temporary license and told me the real one would be in the mail in about 2 weeks. I was there for 15 minutes.

    Much better than the Zootopia DMV…

     

  • Tree 2400706

    This is our tree. Well, it’s the tree right outside our building. NYC has a map of almost every tree in the five boroughs. That’s 678,674 trees. It’s fairly amazing.

    The most  common type is a London Planetree (13% of the total) but ours is a Ginkgo.

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  • Best Day of the Year

    OK, exaggeration. But we look forward to the Atlantic Antic every year. It is unofficially the oldest and largest street festival in New York City and it’s right in front of our place (we live on Atlantic in the Ex-Lax building).

     

    For me street fairs are largely about food, and the Atlantic Antic is better than other street fairs because this is a foody neighborhood. You can get the normal street fair stuff (nothing wrong with that) but also crazy awesome local stuff. There’s a Spanish church on Atlantic that shows up with crazy good food. I try to keep a running list of what I eat every year.

    This year I ate:

    There’s a local gumbo place that was serving gator and andouille sausage jambalaya, but I was too full to try it:

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    Of course, there was music and shopping and kids stuff and all that other stuff. I’m just too full to write about it…

  • You Seem Interested in Pizza

    Google Maps apparently has a new feature where it will recommend things in the area. I turned it on for Brooklyn and just got this recommendation. And yes, I am interested in pizza, thanks for noticing…

    Screenshot_20180628-082559

  • All Rise

    Yankee Aaron Judge sees a kid in the bleachers wearing his All Star jersey. So what does he do? He plays catch with the kid in between innings (letting the kid keep the ball of course).