Har-Money

Hunched at my desk, listening to the twilit chaos of the metropolis far below sieved through the slats of the music in my headphones. A firetruck careens down the avenue, its siren rising to perfect pitch with the song, its pulse in perfect syncopation. Today the universe is harmonious. Tomorrow will be a different story.

Choice Quotes

"Mirrors are the doors through which death comes and goes. Look at yourself in a mirror all your life, and you'll see death at work, like bees in a hive of glass."

~ Jean Cocteau, Orpheus

"There's the Devil to pay and he can keep the change."

~ J.G. Thirwell

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

~ Upton Sinclair

"The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost."

~ John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley

"Her father was not a coherent human being, he was a roomful of old echoes."

~ DH Lawrence, Women in Love

"There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist."

~ Terry Pratchett

"I shit on God, on Jesus, on the cross, on the carpenter who made the cross, and on the son of a whore who planted the pine."

~ Old Catalan Curse

"Genius is the recovery of childhood at will."

~ Arthur Rimbaud

"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed."

~ William Gibson

"Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember."

~ Oscar Levant

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."

~ Mark Twain

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."

~ George Bernard Shaw

"Every snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty."

~ Stanislaw J. Lec

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."

~ GK Chesterton

"Drown in a cold vat of whiskey? Death, where is thy sting?"

~ WC Fields

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true."

~ Robert Wilensky

The iCar

Automobiles in the fifties aimed for a space-age design — sharp angles, tailfins, a built-for-speed aesthetic, anticipating a future of jetpacks, conveyor belt skyways, transparent domes, moon patrols, and personal android servants. Today our autos are functional but shapeless and drab. What happened to the Jetsonian future we were promised?


Not all of our technology is a disappointment though. iPads are reasonably futuristic. You can whip one of those out for some quick calculations traced on a fluid screen, a sleek little device Buck Rodgers himself might have endorsed. But Apple probably should stay out of the automobile industry. You would look very fashionable driving your iCar to, say, Miami, but as soon as you pointed it toward mountainous terrain your request would be flatly denied.

"We don't do uphill."

"But I want to go to Denver."

"Sorry, uphill was deemed too dangerous by our designer."

"Don't you think as owner I should be the one to weigh the risks and make the decision?"

"No, and furthermore due to your insolent manner your driving privileges are revoked until further notice."

On second thought that does rather sound like the future I've come to expect.

Vinegar Hill

Found myself with some unexpected time off the other day so I crossed the river into Dumbo and ventured into a quaint section called Vinegar Hill, where I remembered I was carrying a camera and so emerged with the following...


Dumbo from the Brooklyn Bridge. DUMBO is an acronym for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass" and as far as I can tell has little to do with flying elephants.


A quiet street on Vinegar Hill.


The Commandant's House overlooking the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This was about as close as I could get to it without having bloodthirsty hellhounds unleashed on me.


A storefront on Vinegar Hill.


Manhattan Bridge as seen from the Brooklyn Bridge walkway.


Brooklyn Heights and suspension cables.