The bloggiest post yet

I graduated high school exactly ten years ago today.  If I wasn’t so jammed up with work I’d probably want to write a long, nostalgia-laden post about that day and what it means now, etc.  But there are three problems with that:

Soup!

It was 85 degrees yesterday in New York.  Nevertheless, this place, whose raison d’etre is selling smoothies, was completely undeterred:

Platform

Alright, enough with the hipster neo-puritanical reaction to A____. Apparel ads.  Whatever.  They’re not gross.  They’re artistic, and playfully done.  So just stop it.  You’re either being coyly ironic with your disdain, or when you see the people in these ads

Beer and childhood

Just down the street from us there is a little beer store called “Hercules Fancy Grocery.” It is run by the eponymous Hercules himself (along with his wife, whose name we don’t know but who C and I assume as a matter of logic must be named “Hiscules”), a cute specimen of an aging Greek gentleman shopkeeper.  If he happens to be standing at the front door as I walk past his shop, Hercules always greets me in a supremely polite and friendly manner in his Greek-slanted English.  He sells Belgian beer at his store–a specialty which, unfortunately for him, no longer guarantees a demand for his wares in the neighborhood (even the D’Agostino’s has Chimay now).  These difficulties are compounded by the fact that, due to his higher overhead as a small operator, he tends to charge two or three dollars more per bottle than you might pay elsewhere at this point.  I try to go in once every few months or so and get something (parties are always a good excuse), but these visits too have grown less frequent in the past year.  He is definitely a fixture in the neighborhood; an artifact of the New York which is mostly gone now but whose passing is regularly lamented.  There is a sign in the window, handwritten in marker, that announces excitably:

Maybe I killed some important brain cells

I went out with some friends last night and had maybe one or two extra.  So today I am sufficiently hung over that the following just occurred:  When I got into the elevator in my office building to go downstairs to get some lunch, the elevator car was empty, but the ”1″ button was already lit up.  So instead of processing that information to the conclusion that I had the whole elevator to myself, I actually thought for a second that I ought to be careful where I step,  just in case there was an invisible man in there, so I wouldn’t bump into him.  

Here are some thoughts:

In the interest of time, I will not make any attempt to tie these together, but here goes– 

(a) Want to totally gross yourself out?  Go to http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/rii/index.shtml and click on “Restaurant Inspection Results Online” - - chances are, your favorite restaurant has been cited at least once for something like “Facility not vermin proof. Harborage or conditions conducive to vermin exist,” or

Please send this to Tina Fey; she mentions him in like, every episode

So Barack Obama, right? Way back when in 2000, when he was just a lowly state senator representing a part of Chicago that included the Hyde Park neighborhood where I was an even lowlier reporter for a local weekly newspaper, I talked to Obama at least twice over the phone.  Being an Illinois state legislator isn’t necessarily a full-time job, and he, like many others, practiced law for extra cash on the side.  I used to call him at his law office to get a quote from him when he’d step out and take a stand on an issue of interest to us (which wasn’t necessarily all that often).  I think one time