new york

The dark ages

If you’re wondering where I’ve been the past few days, why no Song of the day posts or daily write-ups, the quick answer is: we lost power.

If you haven’t been wondering, the answer’s the same, but you wound me. Truly, you wound me.

As you may have heard, the east coast of the U.S. recently experienced…well, let’s call it a semi-severe hurricane. It certainly wasn’t as severe as hyped, but all told it caused a fair amount of damage — I think estimates put it at the eighth most destructive recorded hurricane, but I don’t have those estimates in front of me — with several deaths and extensive property damage. Here in New York, we escaped relatively unscathed, with Irene reclassified as a tropical storm by the time in made landfall sometime on Sunday.

But also sometime on Sunday, around one in the morning, we lost electricity in the house, on the block, and pretty much across the island. Here on our little street, we’ve yet to get it back, some three days later.

My iPad conked out on me Sunday afternoon, and my office was closed because of all the problems with the trains and buses (which NYC had shut down on Saturday, in anticipation) the storm had wrought. So it wasn’t until today that I got my hands (not literally) on a working electrical outlet, so I could recharge what needed recharging. Namely, everything.

Which is good, because my last day in the office for a while is tomorrow. On Thursday morning, crack of dawn, I’m headed to Canada for a week at the Banff Centre in, appropriately enough, Banff. I’ll be meeting Heather while I’m there, attempting to write a three-day novel, and quite possibly riding a horse. The first of these sounds quite nice, but the other two are quite possibly the early stages of madness. We shall see.

And not to worry, while I’m gone, there will be some posts here. On Saturday, as the rain picked up outside, I spent some time post-dating stuff. That’s where the daily link posts have been coming from, and there will be songs of the day aplenty while I’m gone. Maybe even a Random Friday Guess 10. If time permits — and I’m not thrown dangerously from either the horse or the novel — I may even check in from time to time. I’ll certainly be checking in via my Twitter page. Now may be the moment you’ve been waiting for to join and follow me there. C’mon! I thought Twitter was dumb before I started, too!

Anyway, one more day of work, possibly several more days without power, and a long morning of traveling to Alberta on Thursday. Till then, it’s mostly reading and games of Monopoly — we played, my parents and sister and me, on Sunday; I won — by flashlight. It’s shaping up to be a weird week.

Putter there

Today was our company outing to Randalls Island, just across the bridge from Manhattan, and it was actually a lot of fun. I got to work around 8:30, answered a few e-mails — fewer than I would have liked — and then I set my away message and headed downstairs to hop on the bus.

We arrived a little before ten and were left mostly to our own devices, with a driving range, batting cage, bean bag toss, and lots of other games available. There was also a short relay race — one leg a sack race, another a three-legged race, the third an egg-and-spoon race with lemons standing in for the eggs — and a dodgeball “tournament,” both of which I just watched. I played some miniature golf with my co-workers, enjoyed a decent lunch, and got to leave work early when we returned to the office around 3.

Meanwhile, much ado about Hurricane Irene, expected to hit us sometime tomorrow into Sunday. It’s unclear just how bad it’s going to get, but we should be safe, at worst losing power for a little while. We’re hoping even that doesn’t happen, though, and we’re far enough from the coast not to be in any of the evacuation areas. We’re also not dependent on public transportation over the weekend, so we won’t be impacted by NYC shutting that down until Monday, when everything should hopefully have returned to normal.

To think that in a week from now, I will be in the Canadian Rockies…

Tuesday links

  • I’m with xkcd on this: fuck cancer.
  • The Prescription to Save Ailing Superheroes. I can’t say I agree with everything here, but it’s an interesting article, particularly the argument against having Thor and Captain America both do double-duty by setting their characters up for The Avengers.

    That said, I enjoyed both of them just fine as summer entertainment, and while I enjoyed X-Men: First Class no small amount either, I think it’s ultimately the least successful film of the three. (I haven’t seen Green Lantern.) Matthew Vaughn’s “auteur vision” seems cribbed from a few other places (like Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie, and like Mad Men), and there’s some pretty iffy racial and gender issues at work in the film as well. But maybe that just underlines Pappademas’ main argument: at least the movie has some distinctive stamp to it, however flawed. [via]

  • NY motorcyclist dies on ride protesting helmet law [via]
  • Soap operas moving online. This will bear further watching. The news, not the shows. (God no.) [via]
  • And finally, Who owns the copyright on a photo taken by a monkey? [via]

A case of the Mondays

Today was a Monday, and boy was it ever!

Although it did get down to about 70 degrees, which was nice after the past few days of the sun trying to kill us where we stand. That didn’t make the subway cars I took to and from work today any less uncomfortably crowded, however.

But I had an idea for a short story and started working on it tonight. I’m not sure if the fact that the deadline for submitting it is August 1 is a good or a bad thing. It got me motivated last time, so we’ll see.

Tuesday various

  • “The body of a Massachusetts woman went unnoticed for two days in a Fall River public swimming pool, which remained open to the public and was even visited by health inspectors, generating outrage and calls for an investigation.” More here, including how such a bizarre and awful thing could actually have happened. [via]
  • I think this song by Paris Hilton is, predictably, dreadful, but I actually prefer when Hilton does stuff like this, when she’s at least doing something. The paparazzi paying attention to a lousy pop star is marginally better than its paying attention to a do-nothing heiress, right?
  • Well I for one am shocked — shocked! — that drug trials aren’t conducted realistically in the world of superhero comics!
  • Roger Ebert on Transformers: Dark of the Moon:

    I have a quaint notion that one of the purposes of editing is to make it clear why one shot follows another, or why several shots occur in the order that they do.

  • And finally, Improv Everywhere’s latest mission is just lovely:

    I used to work right around the corner from that park. (We’re now maybe 10 minutes away.) [via]