One Sunday it was later than usual and the Sun was beginning to set. I parked and heard some giggling and the sound of glass bottles coming from near my dad's stone. The cemetery only recently cleared the vines to open up this section and my dad was one of the first ones in. As such, different people liked to linger near his stone, to sit with their backs against one of the trees or lie back on the little hill.

This night there were three teenage boys drinking and laughing and staggering about trying to be funny for each other. As I got nearer I saw one of them kick one of the older gravestones over and pick it up and throw it. That made me mad and I started walking with more determination.

Grilled 12 ounce New York cut steak, 90 cents? Grilled Salmon filet served with fresh lemon, 90 cents? Original coal oven pizza, 60 cents? Soda, ice tea, bottled water, 10 cents? Yes, unbelievable but true. Patsy's Restaurant a landmark East Harlem institution will be celebrating its 75th Anniversary by rolling back to the 1930s.

Patsy's first opened its New York City location at 2287-91 1st Avenue in 1933, having been the dream of a pair of Italian Immigrant newlyweds, Patsy and Carmella Lancieri. Patsy's established itself as a family style" old fashion type" neighborhood restaurant immediately. Positioning itself in the neighborhood, Patsy's catered to the growing population of Italian immigrants who longed for the cuisine of their fatherland in a casual family style atmosphere.

As a result, almost immediately, Patsy's atmosphere, style and cuisine began attracting many popular famous personalities. Actors and singers such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin and others became regulars. Famous New York Yankees, Phil Rizzutto, Joe Dimaggio and Yogi Berra made it a convenient stop. Elected Officials to include Rudy Guliani, Mike Bloomberg, Spiro Agnew and others visited after a day of vigorous campaigning.

Patsy's will be celebrating this momentous occasion by rolling back all its prices on its menu. Proclamations will be presented by the office of, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Congress Member Charlie Rangel, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Council Member Melissa Mark Viverito among others. We will enjoy music, food and yes, the traditional cutting of the cake. Happy Birthday Patsy's!

Date: Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Time: Press Conference begins at 11:30 AM

Event begins at 11:00 AM - 10:00 PM

Location: 2287 First Avenue, New York

(117 - 118 Street 1st Avenue)

Before I begin a swim I exercise my compulsion to keep the pool tidy, and I paddle about collecting the stray leaves that have settled on the water and tossing them out. I aim for the shrubs by the fence, but they almost always land near or on one of the deck chairs. I don't mind that. It's not tidy, but I know they won't stick to my face as I plow through the water.

As I crouched I saw something floating, something alive. A bee bobbed upside-down, one leg twitching.

We still haven't gotten the kitchen entirely in order and I've been relying on the jar of instant coffee we got when we were living in the hotel for a week.

I hadn't had instant coffee for years, since I was in Europe, where instant coffee isn't scorned the way it is in the U.S. In fact, after trying it again, I much preferred it to anything I could get at a gas station or similar place where coffee sits for hours on a warming tray.

But, the coffee is not great and I've been searching for ways to enhance the flavor. I normally drink coffee black, but I tried adding other ingredients until I came up with a recipe that I had to share.

Caribbean Coffee

- 1 cup coffee (any quality will do, since the other ingredients would only obscure the subtleties in a high-quality brew)
- 1/4 cup milk (I used skim, but you could use full-fat milk for a richer flavor)
- 1 TBSP brown sugar (more or less to taste. You could also use molasses for a much stronger flavor)
- 1 tsp salt (this is critical, and it sounds odd to put salt in your coffee, but it's necessary as it really brings out the flavor of everything else)
- 1/4 cup coconut milk (this is great to have around if you like making curries, and is absolutely delicious in any form in my opinion)
- Optionally, add cinnamon or nutmeg. These spices don't dissolve well, so they are best used as garnish.

You'll need a large mug to hold all this, since you now have about a cup and a half of liquid. Mix it all up in any order and enjoy. The brown sugar, coffee, and coconut milk are the key flavors, and you may want to experiment with the precise amounts of these so that no one of them overwhelms the others. And don't forget the salt.

Something I had never seen up north was this:

What surprised me first was that the Quaker Oats man had branched out into other grains. What surprised me second was that you could have bacon or ham (there was a ham one) in a food product that's packaged only in paper and cardboard - no plastic or metal.

Naturally, I got it and tried the bacon one first. It wasn't bad - essentially salty cream of wheat. There was nothing particularly corn-tasting about it. The mild flavor of grits is perfect for breakfast.

Soon after I had moved to New York City, more than 10 years ago, I was sitting at a booth in a diner near Penn Station when a tall guy in jeans and a cowboy hat took a seat at the counter. He ordered grits and the lady wrote it down and brought them out a few minutes later in a bowl. The guy didn't touch them and said, "Grits don't come in a bowl. Grits comes on a plate." The lady looked at him for a second or two then took them away into the kitchen. And several minutes later came out with a plate. The guy took one bite, then put down his fork. Put some money on the counter and left.

I admired the man's perfectionism in his quest for an excellent example of a favored food, but I laughed at the Quixotic effort to get grits in Manhattan. It's similar to my initial frustration to get a decent bagel or pizza here. It's not worth it - there's plenty of other good things to eat and enjoy. Mangoes for instance.

24 hours to fly from Burlington, VT to Atlanta GA because of backup air traffic in Philly.

Swampy weather. Thankful for central air.

Found a beautiful, tiny, iridescent green wasp on the stairs:

Less than 1cm in length, and so bright that the scanner couldn't capture the color - as though it were trying to take a picture of a mirror.

Jag lumbered out of the kitchen and murmured for a while with Alyson the bartender before slumping onto the bench beside me.

Jag's real name was Jerome Andrew something-Italian-that-begins-with-G. As a kid, his mother had called him "Romy" and it took moving to the other side of the continent to shed that name.

He hadn't eaten yet and looked around for somewhere to get a bite. The cafe only served cookies and what they called scones, but he didn't want that sort of thing. He could see a donut shop and a deli at the end of the street. Tom could imagine what they had to offer, and knew none of it would satisfy him.

There were at least two each of taco joints, Chinese take-out holes-in-the-wall and pizzerias within a couple of blocks from where he sat, but having eaten at all those places in the past, he knew he wouldn't go back except out of desperation.

In this adventure/puzzle, you control Grady the robot with the arrow keys. You need to construct a rocket by finding the three parts and bringing them to the rocket frame.
The rocket parts are being held by various animals that you need to trade with or trap in order to get the parts.
To move around you need the appropriate upgrades (wheel, flipper, wing, etc) but you can only hold three at a time, and the animals steal the upgrades from you.

Play Grady's Adventure

I was sitting on the train to Philly with about an hour to kill.
I completed the crossword and sudoku in the local paper but still had about 20 minutes, so I created a game for myself: what is the shortest pangram I can write that doesn't use any of the words of the example just given? (with the exception of the word, 'the')

I started flexing my brain by trying to shorten the original sentence. The original has 35 letters, but it can be adjusted to: "The quick brown fox jumps over lazy dogs" at 33 characters.
So my target is less than 33 characters, although that seems ambitious with only 7 letter repetitions.

After some time I came up with: "A jovial bird maps the fog, quacking in the waxy haze." (42 characters)
It could be a little shorter, but the sentence would lose some of its coherence and rhythm.

I encourage everyone to try and come up with their own.

AskOxford.com is a fun site to surf around on if you enjoy fooling around with words.

So I digested for half an hour or so and checked email, took a crap, gathered my bags, then headed out. I was north of the mall, and I had already been to the closest museum (Museum of Buildings, with exhibits on architecture and design. They had a nice gift shop although I hadn't bought anything) and didn't feel like walking far. So I headed to one of the $20 Chinatown bus places I had passed the day before.

Peanuts, by Charles Bukowski Good clean fun from the Dirty Old Man

I woke up earlier than usual and after a visit to the restroom the cupboards reminded me that I didn't have any food in my apartment. I dressed in the clothes lying on the floor and when I went out I saw the door across the hall open.

Through the door I saw Frank Bourbon sitting in a chair putting on his favorite pair of socks. I can only guess that they were his favorite since he seemed to wear them every time I saw him and he seemed like the kind of person who would own a lot of socks.
And I recognized them because they were what I considered to be uniquely ugly, and I had given them to him. They had been a gift to me but I had never bothered to take off the wrapper, and a few months ago I happened to learn that he was going to be alone on his birthday. So I bought a pizza and some beer and spent the evening with Frank and I gave him the socks. He drank half of one beer and I drank the rest. After that I noticed that he always left his door open in the morning when he was getting ready for work. At least that was the case whenever I happened to be up and about that early.

This was an entry for JayIsGames Casual Game Design Competition #3 I created with Joe Versoza.

It's a card game with a unique deck, containing up to 5 suits and up to 5 ranks. Unlike in a standard deck of cards, the suits are hierarchical, and also use a bit of rock-paper-scissor logic to determine what card beats another. Also, the ranks are hierarchical, as they are for regular cards, except in Parley the 'Spy' card (2-to-lowest rank) can beat the 'Queen' card (highest rank). Although it may sound complicated, it's pretty easy to pick up the rules after playing a round or two.

The new revision fixes problems with the AI bing too difficult.

I looked at Arnie, who stood in the corner, smoking a cigarette, staring at nothing. He saw me staring and looked back without changing his expression or blinking his eyes. I looked away first.

"So." I said. Nothing moved but Bart's TV screen and Arnie's smoke.