Whose Faulty Vision

Good NYC Weekend

I’ve been having a particularly good weekend, despite the absence of Christmas.

Yesterday I went to the first Broadway show I’ve been to since I moved to the city (why did it take me so long?). I got a standing-room ticket to “The Producers.” It was cheap, and the standing room wasn’t bad–the view is fine, and there’s a bar to lean against. Plus, after the intermission, an usher pointed me to an empty seat, so I only had to sit through half.

Oh, the show itself? It was good. Not as amazing as a lot of people are saying, but good. I was pleased to discover that currently the two leads are being played by Richard Kind and Alan Ruck! For those of you who are saying, “who?”–and that’s probably most of you–they were Paul and Stewart on “Spin City”. Apparently they’re friends in real life, which is why they ended up together on this. They were good, and it was fun to see them playing completely different characters from their “Spin City” personas. Who knew Alan Ruck could do physical comedy? My one acting complaint was that occasionally Richard Kind slipped into a Mel Brooks impression for a moment. He was mostly doing his own interpretation of the character, but every once in a while it seemed like he was trying to be Mel. (I haven’t actually seen the movie, but I could tell which character was played by Mel Brooks in the movie just by spotting these little moments.)

Before the show, I ate at one of the “Papaya” places. I’d always wanted to do that. For you non-New Yorkers: these places are scattered around the city. They only sell one kind of food–hot dogs–and only one kind of hot dogs, for that matter. Then they have a bunch of juices, including papaya juice. The places are crammed with signs about how great papaya juice is, how healthy it is for you and so on. So I had two hot dogs and a glass of papaya juice. It was yummy–I’d eaten papayas before, but never drank the juice.

The good weekend continues today. I became a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I did the math, and it pays for itself if you go 4 times over the course of a year. I think I’m pretty likely to want to go at least 4 times. So I joined, and spent a couple of hours looking at 19th century European paintings (French, mostly) and Japanese art. Good stuff.

Airplane Boneyard

Found on Slashdot: A really cool Google Maps view of “The Boneyard”, a storage site for old airplanes. (Scroll around, it’s enormous.)

Tiger Hasn’t Shipped

Sadly, my copy of Tiger didn’t ship on time. Still hasn’t shipped, in fact. I’m kind of annoyed at Apple.

Tiger is Coming

My copy of Mac OS X 10.4 (”Tiger”) is supposed to arrive tomorrow! A quote from the New York Times review: “But with apologies to Mac-bashers everywhere, Spotlight changes everything. Tiger is the classiest version of Mac OS X ever and, by many measures, the most secure, stable and satisfying consumer operating system prowling the earth.”

Screaming Baby

There’s a screaming baby in the office.

Why is there a screaming baby in the office?

Serenity

The trailer for Serenity is out! The trailer kinda sucks, to be honest, but the movie looks good–looks like we’re finally going to find out what the deal is with River, and why the Alliance wants her so badly.

And wow, most people are going to look at that paragraph and say, “what on earth is he talking about?” If you’re one of those people, go buy the Firefly DVDs. You won’t regret it.

Driver’s License

Guess what I have?

A valid driver’s license, for the state I’m living in! Haven’t had one of those since 2002.