very simple

I know it’s cliched, but I just couldn’t help myself when I was walking down broadway earlier today. It’s still a great-looking building, even if everyone and their mother has taken some variation on this picture.

It’s incredibly dreary and rainy today, which is the perfect excuse for an unemployed person such as myself to not leave my apartment for the entire day. Except, lucky me, I had jury duty down at the federal courthouse. Again. So I had to pack myself onto a rush hour train downtown this morning with everyone and their dripping umbrellas.

You know what happens next. 15 minutes after the start time, the clerk comes in, thanks all of us for our service, and informs us that the case we were supposed to be in the pool for settled late last night, so we can all go home. And, as a bonus, we’re done with jury service, even though they could have kept us on the hook for another week of pool-sitting waiting for another trial.

This was actually great, in that (as I heard on NPR this morning) they’re apparently picking a jury for a large terrorism case next week. So, all-in-all, not a terrible way to do jury service – a half-day on Monday and 15 minutes on Thursday. and I’m done for 4-6 years. It just would have been nice to have not had Monday and Thursday be the rainiest days of the week.

But I got a cool picture as I was leaving so…that’s something.

The signs on top of the old and new subway entrances at 72nd street. Funny how they can be both thematically consistent yet so, so different.

Saturday was Obscura Day, and I participated by going on the tour of the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel. It was really cool. Pictures are not the greatest, owing to the fact that it was really dark down there, and I either had to shoot with my crappy built-in flash or at ISO 1600, which left things mondo-grainy. But here are some pics.

Maybe it’s an inherent part of being a new yorker, but I totally love water towers.

one of the things I love about new york city is the quirky hodgepodge of architectural styles you see just walking around a single neighborhood.

I know it’s only a matter of time before this building (and gray’s papaya next door) get turned into a giant glassy condo, but until then…for all your dancing needs

Yesterday, the plan finally came together for a few of the folks from my 365 flickr group to meet in real life and walk around roosevelt island. Which is a really weird place that I have never been to before. Here are the rest of the pics. as always, click to get the full picture.

Went to B&H this morning, because I am a masochist, and had lunch plans with a friend in midtown, so I opted to walk from 34th and 8th to 56th and 6th, since I had time. I mainly walked up 6th avenue, and (of course) took a few pics.

side note: I have finally figured out how to make square “snippet” thumbnails that aren’t distorted for the photos that I lightbox (I’m sure someone else has a better/quicker way than the one I figured out, but since I’m generally getting more comfortable with photoshop/elements, I’m just glad to have figured something out). I’m certainly not going to go back and redo everything from before, but needless to say, you’ll have to click on the thumbnails to get the actual pictures that I took.

guggenheim

After trying to figure out where to go on this really beautiful day, I discovered that, in honor of it’s 50th anniversary, the Guggenheim was actually free today. I knew there’d be a line and whatnot, but free is free. So I went over.

The line actually moved pretty fast – even though it was wrapped around the block, it only took about 20 minutes to get to the front door. No pictures allowed anywhere inside except from the ground floor (in what I’m sure is an attempt to force people who want to remember the Kandinsky exhibition to buy the official merchandise), but it was still pretty cool. Except for all of the people, of course.

First, after I had progressed through 3/4 of the line and was in sight of the front door, there were these two women who very blatantly tried to cut the line in front of the person in front of me. I, of course, tapped them on the shoulder and pointed out the line that wrapped around the block. They got very bent out of shape, and in very thick french accents, attempted to claim that they were “press”. I was all, “so what?” – pointing out that if there was actual special press access, they should go talk to the guard, not cut in line. Needless to say, they got out of line. One of the folks in front of me was also a french tourist, and he was a bit mortified at his countrymen, but he said that shit happens all the time in France, because everyone else is too polite/timid to actually call someone out. He said he really noticed it when he went to japan and was completely horrified by the french tour groups that came through. I sympathized, as I often wanted to run and hide from American tour groups exhibiting the same sort of “ugly tourist” behavior whilst I was living in Italy.

Then, of course, there were the folks who would plant themselves directly in front of you while you were reading a description or timeline so that you only got a view of the back of their head.

And then there was the bus ride home, where people simply forgot how to behave in public. blocking doors, not moving back, deciding to try to (finally) move back to grab a seat only when about 18 people from the back of the bus were actually trying to move forward to get off the bus. I actually (again, being my loud new yorker self) had to tell two women to stand still so that everyone could get off the bus, regardless of the fact that they felt entitled to a seat (behind the people trying to exit) that had opened up.

But anyway, here are some pics. 365 pic is first, and then a collection of others that you can click on to enlarge.