If you're interested in going, you can take the #4 or D trains to Bedford Park Blvd. in the Bronx.

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Today is 2/4/[0]2 - Another fun date. Yesterday was 2/3, one of those fun fractional days, and the day before had a really cool pattern: 02 - 02 - 02. Beautiful symmetry. What can I say? I used to play number pattern games with the odometer on long drives. I'm no John Nash [A Beautiful Mind], but patterns do amuse me.

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Speaking of Amusement, I get a lot of little stories and messages of inspiration forwarded to me. I'm always pleased that someone thinks to send these to me; in a way it tells me that I'm not forgotten. But you've probably been copied on some of those same messages - have you looked at them? A lot of them are pretty mundane. I think it's more about having something to share, than what gets shared.

Recently, though, I received two funny little bits that are especially worth putting out there.:

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The woman below replied, "You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."

"You must be an engineer," said the balloonist.

"I am," replied the woman, "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is, technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help so far."

The woman below responded, "You must be in Management."

"I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," said the woman, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."

[sound of rimshot]

An old man, a boy, and a donkey were going to town. The boy rode on the donkey and the old man walked. As they went along, they passed some people who remarked what a shame it was that the old man was walking and the boy was riding. The man and the boy thought maybe the critics were right, so they changed places.

Then they passed some people who remarked what a shame it was to make that little boy walk while the adult rode the donkey. They then decided they would both walk.

Soon they passed some people who remarked how stupid it was for the two of them to walk when they had a donkey they could be riding. So they decided they would both ride the donkey.

The next group of people remarked about how cruel they were to overload that poor donkey, so they decided to carry the donkey.

As they were carrying the donkey across a bridge, they slipped and the donkey fell over the side into the river and drowned.

The moral of the story is: If you try to please everyone, you might as well kiss your ass goodbye.

[pah-doomp-boomp!]

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"These are my salad days - slowly being eaten away"
Maybe not so slowly. In two days, the year will be down to 90% - Ten percent of the year will have already been lived thru.

A good freind mine, Jacob, told me the story of how his 7-year-old son was saddened by the festivities on New Years' eve. The young boy couldn't understand why people were so happy that another year was gone - at that age, that's one seventh of his entire life; maybe one sixth or more of the time that he can actually remember.

I can remember a time when summer seemed to last forever. I'm old enough now, that a week can seem to pass in a blink.

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Yesterday was one of those fortuitous days. I ran into an old friend, Deborah, who I haven't seen for many years. She's one of those people that I think of from time to time, and wonder how they're doing - someone who was in my life at a very turbulent time, and left a mark. Even though she was initially a friend of one of my old girlfriends, my friendship with Deborah didn't end when the relationship ended. Deborah was also around to witness the aftermath of the end of my next big relationship, too.

It's probably been 7 years since I saw Deborah last, and there was no doubt who she was, when I saw her through the window of the Starbucks on Spring Street. She's still in the same apartment I remember visiting so many years ago with my ex. What's more amazing is that she was able to move back into the same Manhattan apartment after moving to San Francisco for a year or so. What are the chances of that? There's something special about that kind of consistency.

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Salman Rushdie has an interesting article in the New York Times Online about anti-americanism. As usual, the link has that lame login requirement, but it's a good read.

Here are some excerpts:

"...Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar look like yesterday's men, unholy warriors who forced martyrdom on others while running for the hills themselves...."

"...Anybody who has visited Britain and Europe, or followed the public conversation there during the past five months, will have been struck, even shocked, by the depth of anti-American feeling among large segments of the population. Western anti-Americanism is an altogether more petulant phenomenon than its Islamic counterpart and far more personalized. Muslim countries don't like America's power, its "arrogance," its success; but in the non-American West, the main objection seems to be to American people. Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners' diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted. ("Americans only care about their own dead.") American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centeredness: these are the crucial issues...."

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Interesting spin problem: Bush and Co. have been pushing the idea of the "new kind of war" since the beginning of the campaign against terrorism and the Taliban. Now, they've got prisoners, but they don't want them called "prisoners of war" Hmmmm... seems that many things are new about this new kind of war.