Patience.org

The Empire State Building is 75 years old today.

While no longer referring to it as the “flash building” (because he watches the camera flashes at night from our bedroom before he goes to sleep each night), when I told the little man it was its birthday today, he commented – not unreasonably – that “they should put 75 candles on top of it,” and wondered why the lights were just plain old white tonight, of all nights.

I wondered too, but it turns out that was the color they were that first night, back in 1931. From Apr 28-30 they were turned out, apparently to represent the skyline before it was built, or at least that bit of the skyline up there at 1,250 feet. Mind you seeing as color wasn’t introduced until 1976 according to the NY Times recently, that’s somewhat misleading.

Nonetheless, happy birthday Empire State Building.

The BBC is a wonderful thing and anybody who thinks otherwise is just plain wrong. So there.

Anyway it’s just unveiled a search engine called InFax that can search programme information going back to the 1920s about most programmes aired on the BBC. It doesn’t let you watch the programmes, it just shows you the metadata about them, for now at least.

It’s funny how some programmes stick in your mind when you least expect them to. For example, I have long remembed a programme with a title that ended “….loves Los Angeles,” about a British architecture professor driving around LA describing why he loved it so much. I remember it being aired because he had died recently. But I could never recall his name, or that of the programme.
But I recall watching it one early summer night and finding it so engrossing that I stayed in to watch it all, making myself late to go and meet my mate Geoff in Putney as a result – I even recall walking the couple of miles there to do so as it was such a nice evening, this making myself later still. Why I didn’t tape it, who knows?

Anyway, one search in the InFax thing reveals that programme to have been a 1972 documentary called “Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles”. It shows that it was aired on May 1 1988, and Wikipedia tells me that he did indeed die in 1988, along with a host of other things about him.

Makes me think, in the future are we going to (be able to) forget anything? Or will it just be a case of knowing how to ask the right question in the right place? Or, er, something.

Anyway, thanks BBC for ending that 18-year quest to find out what that programme was that so interested me that evening back in the ’80s.

Pictures from our recent trip to Lancaster, PA and a trip on the Strasburg railroad, an authentic steam railway dating from 1832 which was great fun and comes highly recommended.

I’ll put some more of the Lancaster area and the railroad up shortly. Away from the Amish cash-in – my favorite store was called ‘Amish Stuff Etc’ – the countryside is beautiful and unspoilt.
There’s also some of them on the roof of our building. All in the April 06 album here, and as usual if you need a password, email us.

While that title might sound like the name of a British pub, it’s more to do with what we saw in Florida last month.

We’ve seen snakes (well one at a time anyway) most times we’re down there on Longboat Key and this time we had quite a close run in with this fella. In fact it might be the same one each time as we usually see in him/her (who knows?) in roughly the same place.

And the eagle’s nest that’s been there a while yielded two offspring in January, which as of late March couldn’t yet fly, but could walk out of the nest onto a branch, usually under the watchful eye of Mum and/or Dad. My lack of ornothological smarts prevents me from determining which is which.

Two years on from his last effort, it’s time to dig up that old truism – there is nobody quite like Morrissey.

And he’s lost nothing and gained quite a lot in those two years judging from his latest effort, which is spectacularly good and nicely threaded through with references to Rome, where he recorded it.

I mean, from the mouth of anyone else, the following might sound crude:

There are explosive kegs
between my legs
dear God please help me

We were back down in Florida last week, on Longboat Key with Grandma & Grandpa. The kids had a whale of a time, as did I with my new camera. It’s a huge improvement on the old one.

Anyway, lots of pictures of them here playing bocce ball, T-ball, biking & swimming. And in the little one’s casem following her big brother around and getting involved wherever possible, regardless of how dangerous that might be. But that’s her.
As usual you’ll have to log in to see them so if you need a password etc, email us.

So at 5.35pm we called Aiello’s Pizza a few doors up on 3rd Ave to order a pizza for the kids. Normally we either go and collect it or eat it there. We were planning to do the latter, but this time we decided to have it delivered as we the kds weren’t ready. As it turned out we probably made the last call to place an order at Aiello’s. Five minutes later we noticed smoke coming up from a building close to a Chinese restuarant that caught fire on Friday, which is next to Aiello’s. This time it was Aiello’s turn to mysteriousy catch fire.

I have quite a few pictures from above and around the fire as it developed, here.

It took about 90 mins before it was put out but the place is gutted.

The other side of Aiello’s is a sound stage called Farkas Films. After years of little drama other than that which might be filmed inside, it received a notice that the place had to close and the building was being demolished. Coincidence? Well this is Manhattan real estate and people will do almost anything when chasing a buck, especially in a market we’ve been experiencing over the past few years.

Aiello’s pizza was by far the best round here, but I fear we may have seen the last of it, for whatever reason.

Whatever else happens today, it will still be the day we beat the mob from the Walham Green Dog Track for the first time at home since 1977, when we won 3-1 in the Second Division. Historic stuff & great for Mum & Dad to have witnessed it.

When searching around for ideas for charitable donations last year we came across Donors Choose, a website that enables you to choose exactly to which project at which schools mostly your donation will go to. They make the admin costs of each project explicit and you can choose part of the project, all of it, or al of it plus the minimal admin cost (to cover the website hosting & admin stuff).

As we’re fortunate enough to be able to give a little here and there, we gave a modest amount to an elementary (primary for those outside the US) school in Brooklyn via this website. We got an initial email in return saying thanks with a promise for more details as to how the kids were using the stuff we paid for, including letters from the kids.

And boy, what more we got! This week we received a letter from the teacher plus 15+ handwritten letters from the 8-9 year-old children plus a bunch of photos of them at work using the stuff we helped them get. It’s truly uplifting stuff.

It is both heart-breaking and scandalous that these kids have to rely on donations in a city as rich as New York and a country with such abundance as America. But it’s also heartening that you can make a direct difference to some kids lives.

It also supports schools in places such as Louisiana, Los Angeles, San Francisco, North Carolina and others and I make no apologies for banging on about it. It’s not a panacea, but it’s a great example of how the web can cut out intermediary costs and get money to where real problems exist, and quickly.

The difference between being and four and a half and three years older than that can be pretty marked.

While driving up Sixth Avenue last weekend, with the Empire State Building looming ever larger into view, M’s first cousin, once removed (to use the official terminology) gave us an apparently accurate and quite detailed synopsis of King Kong, which he’d recently seen.

About 30 secs into it, the younger cousin piped up, “he’s a big monkey!” which he later clarified to “a big gorilla,” after which the synopsis run-down continued.

I’m going to miss such innocence when it’s gone, I know it.