[I’ll take] “Awkward Acronyms for $100” Want proof that you’re in an urban, eastern seaboard state? (I’m in Philadelphia at the moment visiting relatives). The transportation system has a name that sounds like it’s a new kind of septic system, or maybe the plural form. In this case, that would be “SEPTA,” short for Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. Somehow,...Read More
Re-Think NYC Minneapolis There’s a billboard campaign in Manhattan at the moment showing how the island would look if Central Park were developed, and the rest of the city . . . wasn’t. It’s a brilliant way of showing the amount of space we devote to each use. How would Minneapolis look rendered in such a...Read More
They Know About Kindle, Right? One of the cheesier ads currently on display in New York subways — and it’s a crowded category, pun intended — is an ad that blares that there are “26,543 Reasons to Attend Our Community College.” So, what are 21,925 of them? The number of books in the College’s library. They do know about Kindle,...Read More
Categories: Fiction and Real Life The winner of the award for “Rudest Cellphone Behavior — Fictional Category” would be the lawyer in the play “God of Carnage,” who advises his pharmaceutical client how to tamp down a drug recall scandal while his stunned hosts watch and listen, aghast, in their own Living Room. (I saw the Guthrie’s excellent...Read More
Six Weeks to Go Grow No, we don’t need a ladder (yet) to reach the top of our backyard sunflower (I grabbed the photo at right from the web). But at 9 feet tall and with at least another six weeks to grow, we certainly appear to have a monster on our hands! Interestingly, whatever seems to...Read More
My Favorite Real Estate Movie My favorite real estate movie, “Groundhog Day” (1993), actually isn’t even about real estate. It’s a romantic comedy in which the suitor, played by Bill Murray, gets to perfect his courting strategy — courtesy of a time loop that causes him to relive the same day, over and over. After various setbacks, his...Read More
