City Chase
I’m volunteering for this thing called “City Chase” this weekend! Very much looking forward to it. Apparently it’s rather like “The Amazing Race”, except in only one city and not on TV. But the basic idea is the same–teams of two go running around the city, doing various challenges and trying to win prizes. The winning team goes on to a national competition in New Orleans, and the winning team there goes on to an international competition in Morocco.
I don’t really have a lot of details yet, and a lot of the details I do have I’m not allowed to share, because they don’t want the teams finding out stuff in advance. So I’ll have more to post about this after Saturday. But I’m excited.
NYC | Comment (0)August in NYC
I saw 15.5 plays/musicals this month.
I paid to see 0 of them.
I love August in NYC.
NYC | Comment (0)Fringe Tally
Sadly, the Fringe Festival is over. It was a light year for me, since I was out of town for two of the three weekends. My tally for 2008:
# of volunteer shifts worked: 12
# of shows seen: 13.5
Explanation for that .5: I walked out of one show. I tried to do it quietly and make sure that the performers didn’t notice, but half an hour of a woman in a leotard rolling around in salt was enough. I wasn’t the first one to walk out, either.
# of musicals: 2.5
Explanation for that .5: “Grecian Formula” was a play, but it had a show-within-a-show that was a musical, so there were a couple of songs.
# of one-performer shows: 1
# of those that were self-indulgent autobiographical crap about “my identity as a” or “my struggle with”: 0, which is very rare for a Fringe season. I don’t think it’s that there were fewer of them this year, I think it’s that I’ve gotten better at spotting and avoiding them.
# of shows about show business: 2
# of shows where “the narrator” or “the author” was a character who interacted with the other characters: 3 (including one that had both)
# of shows set in the past that relied on anachronisms for a big chunk of their humor: 3
# of shows from my hometown of Ithaca (represent, yo!): 1
# of shows featuring men in their underwear: 2
# of shows that both made me laugh and genuinely moved me: 1. “That Dorothy Parker.” Best show I saw this year.
NYC | Comment (0)WTC Plans
Apparently people are all up in arms because someone found a copy of the blueprints for the “Freedom Tower” that’s replacing the WTC. The big deal is that if terrorists got their hands on the blueprints, they could plan an attack.
Look, this is ridiculous. Too many people are involved in designing and building a project of this scale for you to be able to keep details like “thickness of concrete” secret. If all the terrorists need in order to take down the building is a copy of the blueprints, then they’ve already won, it’s just a matter of time.
This is the worst kind of “security through obscurity”, and the Port Authority needs to hire some better security experts.
NYC, News, Rant | Comment (0)Link: White Subway
This is probably only funny to New Yorkers: a white folks’ NYC subway map. It should have the Columbia stops on there, though.
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More Security Theater
The NYC transit authority has a long-running campaign encouraging people to report “suspicious behavior” to the police, in the name of preventing terrorism. The theme is, “If you see something, say something.”
A little while back, they added a fresh bunch of posters: “Last year, 1,944 New Yorkers saw something and said something.” Notable for its absence is any mention of how many of those events actually resulted in a terrorist attack being prevented. I’d guess–hell, I’d bet money–that the reason is that the number is zero. Just more security theater.
NYC | Comment (0)Fringe Roundup
The Fringe Festival ended last Sunday. My tallies for this year:
- # of shows seen: 16 (a new personal record for the NYC fringe)
- # of those that were one-performer shows: 2
- # of those that were autobiographical: 1
- # of those that were self-indulgent enough that I was tempted to walk out: 0 (also a new personal record, I think)
- # of musicals: 8 (counting the “rap opera”)
- # of those that were musical versions of Shakespeare plays that I’ve never seen in their original form: 2
- # of those that included songs making fun of material that Shakespeare clearly intended to be completely serious: 2
- # of times I got advice from a fellow Fringe participant on how to pick up women in gay bars: 1
- # of times a Fringe organizer told me I was saving their life when I showed up to volunteer: I lost count
(If you’re dying to see my tallies from last year, for some reason, they’re here. I sadly didn’t keep tallies from the first two years I did it.)
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