Dingbat of the Day

[Wilfrid]

Reviving this thread and mentioning with all respect Calvin Trillin, the beloved food writer and poet, still with us at 88. From his 2003 Feeding a Yen:

Quote

Manhattan is essentially flat

Viewed from the Village or Brooklyn, I imagine.

He should try walking from Charles Pan Fried back to my apartment. Or from the bottom to the top of St Nicholas Park as I have done countless times for countless reasons.

There's a reason there some places called the Heights. (He surely knows better. Maybe not.)

[bloviatrix]

He's never walked down West 138th street from Broadway down to the river.

[Wilfrid]

There you go. 

[Wilfrid]

He may be fantasizing about his place of birth, Kansas, which is indeed flat as a pancake.

[Sneakeater]

Let's not forget Morningside Park.

Speaking of Dingbats, I made the same mistake planning a walking route across St. Nicholas Park as I did planning a bike route across the Main Island in the Orkneys:  I used a non-topographic map and assumed everything was flat, thinking that the universal recommendations of what seemed to me to be clearly longer out-of-the-way routes were just mistakes. 

In both cases, the mistakes turned out to be mine.

Edited January 4, 2024 by Sneakeater

[AaronS]

walking around upper manhattan is always a little weird to me - the lower part seems so flat and devoid of nature that walking up a hill serves as a weird reminder that upper part wasn't always the way it is.

Edited January 4, 2024 by AaronS
better words

[backyardchef]

The 'heights'

[bloviatrix]

Most people don't of this when when they think of Manhattan.

[Wilfrid]

Is that Inwood?

[bloviatrix]

Yes - Inwood Hill Park. On the path that leads under the Henry Hudson Bridge looking at the duck pond. In my experience, few people who live south of the Heights know how beautiful it is at the northern end of the island.

[Wilfrid]

Yes, a lovely park, and when you're finished walking around it you can drop by PJ Wine, another lovely feature of the neighborhood.

[small h]

Say you're chatting with the person helping you design your wedding invitations, and you tell her the guest list is ~75 people, so you probably need like 90 invitations in case you spill wine on some of them or whatever. And it is not until hours later - while you are in the post office deciding what kind of stamps to put on the envelopes - that it occurs to you that a lot of those people share addresses. And you do not, in fact, need 90 invitations. You are thankful this happened now, and not after you put the order in.

[voyager]

Have you sent out “Save the Date”s yet?   I ask because I haven’t received mine yet.

[small h]

1 hour ago, voyager said:

Have you sent out “Save the Date”s yet?   I ask because I haven’t received mine yet.

They went out months ago. Check your spam folder.

[voyager]

 Brilliant!

 

[MitchW]

On 1/9/2024 at 6:03 PM, small h said:

Say you're chatting with the person helping you design your wedding invitations, and you tell her the guest list is ~75 people, so you probably need like 90 invitations in case you spill wine on some of them or whatever. And it is not until hours later - while you are in the post office deciding what kind of stamps to put on the envelopes - that it occurs to you that a lot of those people share addresses. And you do not, in fact, need 90 invitations. You are thankful this happened now, and not after you put the order in.

Do you need/want a practically brand new tortilla press?

[small h]

5 minutes ago, MitchW said:

Do you need/want a practically brand new tortilla press?

Someone gave me one not more than a month ago! But thank you so much!

[MitchW]

2 hours ago, small h said:

Someone gave me one not more than a month ago! But thank you so much!

As simple as they are, with as few ingredients as it takes to make them, they're a pain in the ass - prepare for a lot of cursing when you attempt.  

It's often the simplest stuff which I find the hardest to make consistently.  Sadly, I;m pretty sure the Nixtamal in the market line is no more, so it's a struggle to find well-made commercial product locally.

[small h]

36 minutes ago, MitchW said:

the Nixtamal in the market line is no more

The turnover in there is crazy. Then again, I can see insanely expensive vintage clothing not having much staying power.

37 minutes ago, MitchW said:

prepare for a lot of cursing when you attempt. 

Thanks for the warning. I will endeavor to retain my usual zen-like calm.

[Sneakeater]

So I'm clearing out a drawer and I find all these sets of subscription tickets for concerts in the Spring of 2020.  Shows I'd REALLY have wanted to see.

And I'm thinking, WHY would I have skipped these?

WHY indeed.

Edited February 4, 2024 by Sneakeater

[small h]

Something in the air.

[Wilfrid]

On 1/3/2024 at 8:47 PM, Wilfrid said:

Reviving this thread and mentioning with all respect Calvin Trillin, the beloved food writer and poet, still with us at 88. From his 2003 Feeding a Yen:

Viewed from the Village or Brooklyn, I imagine.

He should try walking from Charles Pan Fried back to my apartment. Or from the bottom to the top of St Nicholas Park as I have done countless times for countless reasons.

There's a reason there some places called the Heights. (He surely knows better. Maybe not.)

Yesterday I visited Rosenthal’s wine store, walking uphill on Lex from 103rd and then downhill to 96th and could only be reminded of this extremely dumb statement.

ETA: Quoting erases the original quote? “Manhattan is essentially flat.” Nuts.

[voyager]

4 hours ago, Sneakeater said:

So I'm clearing out a drawer and I find all these sets of subscription tickets for concerts in the Spring of 2020.  Shows I'd REALLY have wanted to see.

And I'm thinking, WHY would I have skipped these?

WHY indeed.

The opposite of this, when we were first married, husband used to empty his pockets after a night out and drop ticket stubs in one of those ceramic "nest egg" banks.    Several years down the pike, our house was burglarized and the egg was among stuff taken.    We laughed about the thief who broke open the egg, assuming the ruffle of paper was currency, only to find our momento stash of used tickets. 

[Wilfrid]

Interview with Pete Townshend in the Times kicks off with author Rob Tannenbaum describing him as one of rock’s greatest *singers.*

Really?

Then the director of the new Tommy credits him with using “repeating musical themes, which Lerner and Loewe and Stephen Sondheim also did.”

Yes, it probably begins with them. Even though Lerner was a lyricist.

Then I stopped reading. Whatever happened to editing?
 

 

[voyager]

You never read Jay McInerney.

Edited March 23, 2024 by voyager