A couple of weeks ago, my firm assigned a brief to me and another associate in a National Labor Relations Board case the firm has been involved with for a few years. We're each writing one of the two issues in the brief. The catch, though, was that in addition to all of our regular work, preparation for writing this brief would include reading the 16,000 pages of transcript from the actual courtroom proceedings in the case, which were held in federal courts in New York and Washington, DC this spring.

That's not a typo. I said sixteen thousand pages.

I've managed to fit some in among all the other work, but when I'm in the office, phone calls and e-mails come in constantly, and other things require my attention (like my sixty active civil service cases). It's great to be busy and in demand at my job, but it isn't conducive to settling down with a couple of boxes full of paper and giving them my full attention for several hours.

So here I am working from home today. I've gotten through a decent chunk already, but with tons more to go - and naturally I still have occasional other things coming my way via e-mail (I haven't checked my work voice-mail yet, but I certainly will soon). I'm also getting hungry - and I immediately knew what I had to do.

SeamlessWeb was started several years ago by a couple of New York City lawyers who were frustrated by the complexity of getting their firm to reimburse them for meals they ate when they were working late at the office, but it expanded way beyond that in the following years. The vast majority of delivery restaurants in Manhattan, and many in other boroughs as well, are now on SeamlessWeb's network. You just go online, give them your credit card and address once, and forever after, it will tell you which restaurants deliver to your location and which of those are open right now, and you select from an online menu.

Even in my relatively sleepy residential neighborhood, it's still Manhattan - 101 restaurants on Seamlessweb.com deliver to this address. It's a beautifully efficient method of ordering a meal, and I've probably used it close to a hundred times since I discovered it in... oh, I don't know for sure, 2005? They're also in a few other cities, though I can't remember any offhand beyond Philadelphia.

Anyway, there's a rather large burrito winging its way to me shortly, courtesy of SeamlessWeb and Burritoville. It's going to help get me through the next few thousand pages of testimony. I hope y'all are having a nice day and a good lunch.

If a giant crane is going to collapse a couple of blocks from your apartment, destroy a couple of buildings, and kill a couple of people, try to avoid being on a plane to Reno and unreachable when it happens. It sure does increase the voicemail and e-mail volume for the rest of the day.

Reason #185: I don't know of any other block besides mine in the entire five boroughs where the price of a good haircut includes a generous glass of twelve year old Macallan single malt Scotch and some Ghirardelli chocolate.

My roommate is moving out at the end of the current lease on April 30. If you know of anybody looking to share a place in NYC, please feel free to pass this link along:

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/roo/604794370.html

I attended the weekly Urbana Slam at the Bowery Poetry Club this evening, to see little_odd_duck perform some of her poetry in competition as I'd promised I would ages ago. It turns out to have been a good night for it. She opened with "The Wanderer" (which can be seen in an earlier performance in this YouTube clip), and got the highest score of the eight poets performing. She also won the round of four, and then won the last round against a friend of hers, with two incredibly contrasting poems, gut-wrenching and nostalgic respectively.

Even with an open-mic segment and a couple of featured touring poets preceding the slam, only a few other poets managed to touch me with their words tonight, but it was a few hours well spent. Things like Def Poetry Jam or dramatic spoofs of feminist poetry nights and teenage angst "poetry" really don't do the art form justice, though you could see their influence in the (mostly amateurish) open-mic segment. But as with most performance arts, the truly talented distinguish themselves quite acutely from the rest of the pack.

With her victory, little_odd_duck moves on to the Urbana semi-finals, date TBA. I hope to cheer her on with another glass of Laphroaig in my hand.

...make me happy no matter what else is going on in my life.

At 8pm on July 16, Billy Joel will play the last Shea Stadium concert ever, before it meets with its wrecking ball destiny and the Mets move to CitiField next door. And I'll be watching from a floor seat, in section A8.

Booyah™.

I'm quite certain I got on an E train at the World Trade Center stop after my lunch with Gerald, a friend from law school who's opening his own solo practice downtown. In fact, it even still said it was an E train when I got off of it...

...on Roosevelt Island.

WTF?!

On the other hand, how sad is it that I'd never been on Roosevelt Island before today?

After two weeks in a row of thirteen-hour days here at the firm, I very badly needed a three-day weekend like this one. I started things off early, joining a few high school friends for drinks and dinner in midtown on Friday evening; one even surprised us by showing up at the last minute from Ohio. We had fun reminiscing about stuff that happened more than twenty years ago (ouch!!), and catching up on what we and other classmates were up to; we're now thinking about trying to arrange a larger-scale reunion in a few months.

Saturday, I slept in, then rode my bike about 25 miles. The rest of the afternoon and evening was spent at Coney Island celebrating magnetgirl's birthday with her and a bunch of her friends, including our overlap friend coyotegoth. (I assume at least a few other friends of hers at the party are also LJ users, but I haven't seen a post from her about it yet, so I'm not gonna speculate.) I ate Nathan's hotdogs (and creamy garlic fries - SO good), rode the Cyclone and the WonderWheel for the very first time, and just relaxed on the beach with cool people, good food, and a spectacular sunset.

Sunday, I slept in, then rode my bike about 30 miles. I didn't do much else productive Sunday; I had been invited to a BBQ, but it was in the middle of the outer-borough boonies, I wasn't going to know many people there, and I was still tired. So I stuck close to home and just relaxed.

Monday, I slept in, then rode my bike about 50 miles. Then my friend Dave from college and radio came by; he lives in California, but was in town for his sister's wedding. We hung out for several hours, walked around the neighborhood for a while, and he indulged in a couple of New York guilty pleasures, pizza from a real pizzeria and a chocolate-dipped cone from an ice cream truck on the corner.

The weather just could not have been better these last few days... and it's still supposed to be gorgeous for another few days. I wish I had those days off, too! Alas.

Been meaning to get around to this post for nearly a week...

Since I moved away from Ithaca almost exactly seven years ago, I think I'd managed to spend a total of about four or five hours with chesther and psyllisa catching up properly or just hanging out (I don't count Gram's calling hours two years ago; that wasn't exactly social). For much of the previous several years, though, we'd been practically inseparable.

So while I was sorry for his predicament, I was delighted to hear from Chris that, due to his unusual employment & commuting situation, and the fact that he only got one day off for July 4th, he was out of pocket and wondered if he could come hang out in the city. Absolutely, I said. I helped him navigate a little, and he did an excellent job of making it to my place on the Upper East Side via public transit with very little difficulty for a guy who'd only been to Manhattan twice before.

We didn't get to spend any time with the woman I'd been seeing for a few weeks, because, well, she was spending the holiday with another guy she'd apparently been seeing. 'nuff said. :-) But we caught up over huge, excellent burgers at Jackson Hole, then headed to Park Slope, Brooklyn for a BBQ friends of mine from law school were throwing (which made the burgers at Jackson Hole decision look kind of silly, but oh, well). We hung out for several hours over much beer and many varieties of yummy foodstuffs, as Chris met and conversed with a bunch of my law school friends. He somehow managed to stay awake nonetheless!

Late in the evening, we watched two different fireworks shows from our vantage point on Doug & Joni's roof; a more distant one over Jersey City, and a closer one over South Street Seaport. Chris noted it was the first time he'd ever seen the Manhattan skyline in person from outside Manhattan, which is amazing, but true. The rain mostly held off, and we made it back home with a minimum of fuss. Chris crashed on the airbed, and we somehow got going very early the next morning to our respective workplaces.

It was definitely great to hang out with him after all these years, and I hope circumstances allow him (and Celisa) to visit again soon.

Yesterday was my first time visiting Sandy Hook, a barrier peninsula extending awkwardly out of Middletown Township, New Jersey into the Atlantic Ocean about twenty miles south of New York City. I met some friends from my El Tour de Tucson training group at the Sea Streak Ferry landing at E. 34th Street at 7:45 in the morning, and I napped in my seat on the ride down.

We met up with a bunch of other Team in Training folks, including some more of my friends, and set out for a ride. It was a beautiful, sunny day with strong headwinds when we biked south and decent tailwinds coming back north. We did two loops of the island, a total of about 21 miles, before taking a break. A small group was just setting out for a third loop, and I certainly felt I had the energy left. But I decided that I would take the noon ferry back rather than wait until the 3pm ferry; I hadn't been sleeping well, and I had plans for the evening, so I hoped to get in another nap first.

On the Sea Streak on the way back up, I decided to enjoy the sun some more by taking in the view from the roof deck, and I'm so glad I did. As we cruised northward, out of the haze some shapes started forming that I had never seen before, and I was moved beyond words.

My flight path into New York has, on occasion, taken me over Manhattan. I have taken the Staten Island Ferry and seen Manhattan from the southern perspective. I have taken the Circle Line cruise around Manhattan and seen it at every angle from sea level.

But before yesterday I had never entered New York Harbor by boat - passing first Coney Island and Seagate - then the entirety of the eastern bank of Staten Island, cruising underneath the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge which connects it to Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn - through the Buttermilk Channel between Red Hook, Brooklyn and Governors Island, formerly Fort Jay, with the Statue of Liberty in the background - and finally cruising up the East River with Brooklyn Heights on one side and South Street Seaport on the other.

It felt massive, uncontrollable, spectacular - beautiful, untamed, untethered, and alive. It felt like home.

I disembarked at E. 34th Street, then biked over to 1st Avenue and up the 54 blocks to my apartment, and the smile never left my face once.

(Regular updates on my training and fundraising for, and reasons behind my participation in, El Tour de Tucson can be found at tucsonorbust, Tucson or Bust.)

Our flight was on-time, smooth, and uneventful; we even arrived in Paris a half hour early. I sat next to Ede, a woman from northern Arkansas, and behind us Mom sat next to Erin, Ede's daughter, who was on her way to San Sebastian, Spain for a five-week study abroad program. Ede has been in the "constituent relations" department of the University of Arkansas's development office for several years, and was pleased to encounter for the first time someone else who knew what she was talking about.

In any event, she was the best kind of long-flight seatmate; she never had to get up to use the lavatory, and she slept for 80% of the flight. Of course, since she slept with the help of an Ambien, she also slept through her dinner - while trying to eat it. I helped ensure she didn't end up wearing her beverage, and she went right back to sleep.

I didn't sleep at all, because I knew how painful it would be to awaken after only a brief nap. I got some writing done, and watched "Following" via Netflix; it's a brief but clever noir piece from the same writer/director as "Memento." I also watched the in-flight edit of "Dirty Dancing" (which followed "Mrs. Potter," in which I had no interest), and was constantly annoyed by the scenes they'd cut to make it palatable for airline audiences. If you'd never seen it before, you'd have been completely lost. At least the music and dancing are fun.

The cab right into Paris from De Gaulle Airport was long, and made a bit worse by it being morning rush hour, but we arrived at our hotel by 9:30, the Hotel Astor Saint-Honore in the 8th Arrondisement. We were lucky enough to have one of our two rooms ready at that hour of the morning, so we briefly made camp, then enjoyed the hotel's buffet breakfast. We then embarked upon the first day's adventure - we took the Metro to the Trocadero stop, wandered briefly in the vicinity of Le Musee del Hommes, and then caught our first sight of Le Tour de Eiffel. It's really rather tall - and I know that may sound odd coming from a resident of Manhattan, but the Empire State Building is surrounded by others at least half to two thirds as tall, so it doesn't stand out against its environs the way the Eiffel Tower does.

We waited on line for over an hour to ride the elevator up to the first and second landings, and then took in the spectacular view. Unfortunately, to our surprise we discovered there was another wait of at least a half hour for the elevator to the top landing, and after Dad's brief attempt to find a manager, we descended, weary, physically sore, and disappointed. He found a manager at ground level, hoping to get a refund for the difference in price between a top landing ticket and a second landing ticket, but to our pleasant surprise he offered to send us right back up and put us at the front of the line. Mom declined, as she was just too tired, but Dad, Mark and I went back up, and it was really worth it - if for no other reason than not to have to say I went all the way to France and only went halfway up the Eiffel Tower. The view was all that much more spectacular, and we really did get up there relatively quickly.

After sandwiches from a street vendor, we made our way back to the hotel by Metro, only to find out that at 2:30 our second room was still not ready. A brief ten-minute wait, and then Mark and I could finally secure our own space. We napped for a couple of hours, then set out again. This time we braved the crowded, smelly rush hour on the Metro (with two line changes) to the Luxembourg stop, where we visited Le Jardins de Luxembourg, a lovely public park where many native Parisians were relaxing after a day's work. At one point, a gentleman asked me to take pictures of him and his girlfriend, to which I obliged - only to find that he was pulling out a Cartier bag, opening a ring box, and asking her to marry him. I think Mark alertly got more, and better, photos than I did - including with the gentleman's own camera (I probably ruined my chances of getting any truly good photos by trying to get photos with mine at the same time as his). The couple both spoke English, so Mark gave them his Flickr card and offered to send copies of any shots they liked.

We then wandered out the far end of the gardens, to find ourselves in the neighborhood of the Odeon Theatre, not far from where our concierge had made dinner reservations for us, at Le Bastide Odeon. I chose my entree poorly, as the "braised breast of pork" turned out to be basically an undercooked brick of bacon meat. But the artichoke heart and goat cheese appetizer, and the dessert of rhubarb pastry with ricotta ice cream and strawberry syrup, along with the lovely house red wine, made up for it.

A cab ride back to the hotel, past some of the more interesting landmarks we'd be visiting, and we were done for the evening. Mark and I got a good night's sleep to prepare for Day 2.

(By the way, apologies for all the French spelling errors I'm sure to make. It ain't my second language the way it is Mark's...)

I just had a wonderful massage. The woman to whom I went also gave me a fantastic massage at home two days before I took the Bar Exam in July, 2005, but in the interim I had lost her contact information. Remembering only her first name, I managed to track her down via Craigslist, and today I went to her studio in Chelsea where she usually works. She's very strong, isn't afraid of deep tissue work if it's what you really want, and isn't a clock-watcher. She's a little pricy, but worth every penny. Anybody living in (or visiting) the NYC area who's interested in her contact information, please let me know.

I wish I could afford to have one of these every week, but for now I will probably at least plan to have one more often than every 19 months. :-)

EDIT: Apologies to anyone who may have already submitted answers to the earlier version of this post, as you'll have to do it again. I was unable to view the results of that poll, so I couldn't have graded it. Strange. Anyway, carry on. :-)

As with Part I:

1) No research, Google or otherwise, is allowed. You're on your honor here.
1.5) Yes, I already knew all the answers before I wrote the quiz, but I did verify them before posting it.
2) If you don't know the right answer, creativity counts.
3) Winners will be announced in one week.

( Here be more quiz questions... )

Feel free to comment on the quiz, but please don't talk about the answers in your comments. Thanks!

I gave you credit if you were pretty close - e.g., if you said Dan Rather was accosted outside CBS instead of on Park Avenue. Only half a point if you named the wrong CBS newscaster, though. :-)

Where did R.E.M. get the title of their 1994 song "What's the Frequency Kenneth?"?

In October, 1986, someone assaulted Dan Rather on Park Avenue, demanding to know, "Kenneth, what is the frequency?" He was identified in 1997 as William Tager, a mentally disturbed man who was already serving time for killing an NBC stagehand in 1994 outside the "Today Show" studios.

From 1903 to 1913, the baseball team now known as the New York Yankees were the New York ________

Highlanders

Before 1903, the baseball team now known as the Yankees were the __________ __________

Baltimore Orioles

The Empire State Building is framed by which three streets?

5th Avenue, 33rd Street, and 34th Street. The west side of the building is framed by another building, not a street.

What Manhattan neighborhood is part of the mainland rather than an island?

Marble Hill; the Harlem River was redirected in 1895 and filled in in 1914, but a judge ruled in 1935 that the neighborhood was still part of Manhattan rather than the Bronx (prompting the Bronx borough president at the time to refer to it as "the Bronx Sudetenland").

Since the NCAA Div. I men's basketball tournament started in 1939, which is the only NYC school to win it?

City College of New York, in 1950

How many different event halls have borne the name Madison Square Garden, and of those, how many have actually stood in the area of Manhattan known as Madison Square?

Four, and two (the first two).

What is New York City's largest park, and in what borough?

Pelham Bay Park, in the Bronx.

In the classic action movie "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three," why is the hijacked subway called "Pelham One Two Three"?

Its originating station was Pelham, and it departed at 1:23.

From downtown Manhattan to the Upper West Side, the local 1 train and the express 2/3 trains follow the same route. Name all the stations at which they both stop - and the one station on that list at which you cannot change trains simply by walking across a small platform.

Chambers, 14th, 34th/Penn Station, 42nd/Times Square, 59th/Columbus Circle, 72nd, and 96th Streets. At 34th Street/Penn Station, you have to go down one flight and back up a flight to switch from the local to the express or vice versa.

Congratulations to pootrootbeer, with 5.5 out of a possible 10 points!

Part II of the quiz tomorrow...

So, you think you know New York City pretty well? Try your hand at my Great New York City Quiz (Part I).

1) No research, Google or otherwise, is allowed. You're on your honor here.
2) If you don't know the right answer, creativity counts.
3) Winners will be announced in one week, when Part II appears.

( Here Be Quiz Questions... )

EDIT: Feel free to comment on the quiz, but please don't talk about the answers in your comments. Thanks!

Last night, my old friend Eddie and I decided that we would spend today paying our respects to the late James Brown, who would be lying in state on the stage of the Apollo Theater on West 125th Street in Harlem, where he got his start in 1956. The doors were to open at 1pm, close briefly at 6 for a half-hour private service for family and close friends, and open again from 6:30 to 8.

We arrived at 9 o'clock sharp this morning, and there were already two lines forming behind barricades, one stretching east from the theater, the other going west. We were lucky to be behind only about a hundred other people on our line, the eastern one, but almost immediately, hundreds more began arriving. We would later discover that our eastern line - eight or nine people wide, and stretching a few hundred feet down 125th Street to Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd. - kept going north on Powell to 126th, where it curved back to the west and stretched all the way to Frederick Douglass Blvd., the length of a few football fields. And that was just one of the two lines - the other stretched west down 125th Street, presumably also for several blocks.

Among the many people we met today was boxer Iran Barkley, former middleweight and light heavyweight champion of the world, the only man to knock out Tommy Hearns twice. Nice fellow, and he got a lot of attention from the folks around us.

The horse-drawn carriage bearing the Hardest Working Man in Show Business arrived a couple of hours late, so we had to continue waiting while they got things set up inside the theater, but they started letting us in at about 2:30. Eddie and I made it in at 3pm on the dot. Thankfully, we were allowed to break off from the line briefly to use the restrooms - after which we moved single-file onto the stage, past the open casket, past the Rev. Al Sharpton, and back offstage. James Brown looked... small.

After we left the theater through the 126th Street exit, we got a better look at the other end of the line as I described above. These people would likely be waiting for several more hours. We then paid our respects to the International House of Pancakes on Powell at 135th Street, the only IHOP in Manhattan. That alone was worth the trip, though perhaps not the six hours standing on a post-surgical knee in 45 degree weather with a cold.

Click on the photo to see several more - naturally, photos were not permitted inside the theater.

An audio file of the remote "wrap" I did for WVBR news is available on the WVBR Podcast Page, courtesy of mhaithaca.

EDIT: I was also briefly interviewed on camera for syndicated entertainment magazine show "Inside Edition." Tonight's show airs at 11:30pm on WLNY (ch. 55 on Time-Warner in Manhattan), and 4:30am on WNYW (ch. 5). Let me know if I end up on TV.