Chelsea is a neighborhood known for a lot of things. But notable graffiti isn’t one of them.

That’s why I cameraphone-snapped the above example. For one, it’s fairly sky-high, at least 10 stories up; that means it was intended for a wide audience. At least, as wide as the car and foot traffic on 9th Avenue and 14th through about 18th Streets will allow. That simple three-word call-and-response — “Slang Who” “Who!” — doesn’t say much, but it’s cryptic enough to make for a unique cityscape scene.

As is usually the case when I photograph such a scene, there is a larger version on Flickr. But the detail above isn’t really clear in the larger scene. All you really get is a better overview of that lower part of 9th, including the landmark Prince Lumber storefront. So really, don’t even bother clicking through.

This marks my latest post concerning some specimen of New York City graffiti. I should smarten up and create a blog category for it. Although it doesn’t feel like I’ve yet attained critical mass for that…

If it’s not enough for your TinyURL or bit.ly shrink-link to be an effectively blind destination, then new URL shortener Trick.ly furthers the online obfuscation:

Trick.ly is a free service that shortens and password protects web links you want to share with select individuals on the internet. And rather than rope you and your contacts into a new social network, Trick.ly allows you to share with people on-the-fly.

If you want to protect secrets from the “merely curious”, Trick.ly lets you put a password on links with clues only your friends would get.

So instead of directly heading for the intended page, Trick.ly speedbumps you first for the password/security question. A short pause, and maybe an appreciated one — but a process that ultimately gums up the free-flow Web even further. Just what we need.

Still, this is a creative approach. It doesn’t look like it’s particularly secure; I’m sure you can crack most user-generated passwords with little effort, so top-secret links should go elsewhere (like, not on the Web in the first place). I suppose Trick.ly is no more inane than any other shortening service, so get as tricky as you want with those shortform links.

Here’s a novel use of iPad versatility:

Forgot to mention – when I was in Ireland – a restaurant was using iPads for menus.

Any independent verification of this? I’ve found the concept advanced, mainly as a way to eliminate waiters, but no actual sightings other than this tweet.

I’d hit any restaurant that attempted it, just for the experience. Imagine the surprise at opening a routine-looking leather menu cover, and instead of a printed price list, finding a touchscreen inside…

As much as we’re accustomed to consuming online content in decentralized, permalinked chunks, it sometimes pays to take in something in its “true” synchronized state. To wit:

Liz at Bobulate follows up a post about the virtues of standing still with one about the joys of jumping. Both dealing with the wholly literal versions of those states of being, to boot.

The free-form ease with which you can switch gears so completely from one day to the next is probably why some of us started blogging in the first place. Always good to come across such entertaining reminders.

If Fortune Magazine is to be believed, there’s a new drinking game sweeping the nation:

“Icing” — or “getting iced” — is a drinking game that’s rapidly gaining popularity amongst office workers, tech and media types, and college students. The rules are simple: If a person sees a Smirnoff Ice, he or she must get down on one knee and chug it, unless they happen to be carrying their own Smirnoff, in which case they can “ice block,” or refract the punishment back onto the attacker. In order to dupe people into stumbling across the beverage, participants have devised creative ways of presenting them with Ices, like strapping the bottles to the backs of dogs or burying them in vats of protein powder.

The trend first took hold on college campuses in the South, but it’s trickled up both coasts, where icings have been spotted at the offices of companies like Yelp! and IAC’s College Humor. Bankers, too, have embraced the fratty fad: An ice attack was recently reported at Goldman Sachs, and Fortune has learned of icings at Florida-based investment bank Raymond James and New York City hedge fund D.E. Shaw.

Smirnoff parent Diageo claims to not be behind this brand-specific recreation. It certainly does smack of corporate-guided viral/guerilla marketing, so it wouldn’t shock me if that turns out to be a lie. Then again, I can totally see this being a genuine grassroots effort. People — particularly the college-aged contingent behind this — love their vodka.

Then again, again: I’m not sure how much to make of this. A handful of frat boys in the finance industry are playing with liquor bottles — so what? I don’t see this taking hold on a wide scale.

While browsing through a Duane Reade last week, I noticed this odd-looking rack of wares on an end-aisle. The hanging unit invites you over with a simple exhortation: “What’s Wrong?”. The individual packets provide the guiding-tandem answer: “Help I have a headache”, “Help I can’t sleep”, “Help I’ve cut myself”, etc.

At the time, I wasn’t suffering from any of the addressed ailments. So I moved on. But I kept a mental note on the display, with its unconventionally simple and colorful packaging.

It’s the product of Help Remedies, a quirky little startup in generic pharmaceuticals. It’s a New York-based operation, which explains their Duane Reade placement (although the look-and-feel of their output put me more in mind of something you’d find in Target, so don’t be surprised to find Help products there soon enough). There’s a distinct philosophy at play here:

[Design firm] ChappsMalina was approached by Help Remedies, a New York City-based startup with a big idea: to revolutionize over-the-counter medication. The resulting line consists of 6 products that are designed to guide you through the medication aisle with ease and comfort. From “help, I have a headache” to “help, I can’t sleep”, instead of yelling “FAST ACTING!” and “EXTRA STRENGTH”, the brand whispers in lower case empathy.

The product approach was simple; keep it clean and minimal with enough coding to clearly articulate my needs in a moment of crisis as directly as possible. Instead of lab coats, ChappsMalina chose to communicate content through the soft topography of the packaging material, that is reminiscent of a soft white pillow. To reinforce the Help Remedies message of responsibility, we designed the packaging using a highly innovative combination of paper pulp and co-molded corn-based plastic, making it completely compostable and a first of its kind.

They’re not kidding about that compostable claim; in fact, they’re tracking the mold- and worm-filled bio-breakdown of the material online (and via Twitter, of course).

Help certainly got my attention, which is the primary point. Then again, I didn’t buy anything. Even if I had been in the market for some ibuprofen or bandages that day, the offbeat presentation struck me as just a little too un-drugstore. If I’m hurting, I appreciate the empathy, but also want the straightforward relief. I don’t get that by wondering what’s up with the kooky sales pitch.

It’s been around since last summer, but this week is the first time I’d seen The Big Gay Ice Cream Truck parked on the streets of Manhattan. I cameraphoned this photo (embiggened on Flickr) in Union Square, at Broadway and about 16th Street.

Without the sign, you wouldn’t know this food truck from any other four-wheeled ice cream purveyor. I didn’t hear the jingle; I can only imagine that it’s something that melds disco and dairy.

Some call it their archive, others call it their morgue file. Frank Chimero calls his collection of Web-found essays his “text playlist”:

…I take this list and revisit and reread it every 4 to 8 weeks. You could almost consider it a playlist of text: it’s very select (I artificially limit it to 10-15 articles), I typically read them all in one sitting, and the order and pacing is very purposeful. Most revolve around what it’s like to be making things in 2010, and a lot of the people that I respect the most have pieces in it. It’s almost a pep talk in text form. I visit it when I’m down, when I’m lazy, when I’m feeling the inertia take over.

This inspirational effect recently extended beyond the original curator, to spawn someone else’s text playlist. Although, in my opinion, Liz is already making wordplay music on an even more mix-and-match level with her collection of Paragraphs To Love.

As a lover of clever wordplay myself, this concept holds some appeal. But I don’t know that it would re-energize my creative juices. As much as I get aesthetic pleasure from admiring a well-crafted piece of prose, I tend to get discouraged by such exercises, because I feel my writing skills can’t measure up. I’d almost rather practice my cunning linguistics in a vacuum, rather than build a file that’ll fuel my creative jealousy.

The peepshow booth meets performance art in Theatre for One, an experimental entertainment venue in Manhattan that literally crams together the viewer and the viewed:

[Producer and designer Christine] Jones’s theater is a movable box nine feet long and four feet wide. For 10 days starting Friday, it will stage short performances in Times Square, weather permitting. Ms. Jones has lined up six new plays and a dance piece, along with musicians, a stand-up comedian and a puppeteer, among other performers. Just as every performance will have only one audience member, every performance will have only one performer.

At this point in a story like this, there would usually be a sentence that began with the words “seats are available.” But “Theater for One” is about singular sensations, so in this story that sentence goes like this: The seat will be available on a first-come-first-served basis.

Of course, Times Square is no stranger to the concept of one-on-one performances — it used to be the area’s hallmark attraction. So I can’t think of a more appropriate location for this theater-in-a-box, even if the content is nowhere as risque as the fare from the bad old days.

Do old-fashioned caller-requested song dedications on the radio have a place on the Web? The mind behind Thisgoesout.to thinks so:

There is an alchemy to song dedications — canned ingredients combined to express earnest and deeply felt emotion. The music is often saccharine. The words of love and longing tend toward the generic, delivered in the slick, mannered voice of the DJ. And yet, with dedications, as with many forms of private sentiment expressed in public, the emotional pull is undeniable.

Maybe all that is true, but the online result here is rather uninspiring: A sparsely-adorned page of black-and-while pixels, with just the short dedication message and a Flash player-ette of the song that’s “going out to”. Doesn’t really have an impact. Even worse, there’s no permalink for each dedication page — the Tumblr-powered site slots new requests onto “Page 1″, thus pushing the archived ones down the line and continually changing their individual URLs. In other words, you can’t even send a link to your object of dedication so that they can see the online love.

The idea is to recreate the schmaltzy sentimentality of Casey Kasem’s classic long-distance dedications, and you need more than an unadorned page with a Twitter-like quip to do that. Overall, I don’t see this online translation capturing the spirit of the original radio-borne expressions set to music.

I agree that there’s “alchemy” in those radio airwaves, though. Not that I was ever one to participate — radio’s never been my preferred medium. But I recall listening to a late-night music show on local NPR years ago, in Tampa. The unique feature that I found to be the entertaining hook: The bulk of the dedications came from women who were sending a musical shout-out to mates who were in prison. It was comical and poignant at the same time — which I guess counts as alchemical.

Coming from a professional background which included regularly toiling every 30 days to help put out a monthly business magazine, the thought of jam-blasting a full-sized print edition in a mere two days is a bit mind-boggling:

Here’s how it works: Issue Zero begins May 7th. We’ll unveil a theme and you’ll have 24 hours to produce and submit your work. We’ll take the next 24 to snip, mash and gild it. The end results will be a shiny website and a beautiful glossy paper magazine, delivered right to your old-fashioned mailbox. We promise it will be insane. Better yet, it might even work.

Actually, I can certainly see the editorial portion being tucked away in a day. My biggest adjustment in going from daily newspaper production to monthly magazine-making was the extended deadlines, and just how much air there was to fill as a result. Certainly, those extra days were put to good use for extra content production, verification, aggregation, etc.; but there’s also a load of wasted time. Compactness can produce gold, as all those hourly deadlines on the newsdesk proved.

But. Starting from the ground up with conception, physical production, and all the rest, in 48 hours? Yeesh. That’s a different order of craziness. I’ll be curious to see the end result. The 48 Hour Magazine blog is offering up cryptic clues to the theme, which seemingly includes 19th Century print advertisements, Brer Rabbit, and the history of lottery offerings in New York. What a stew of a news-well…

Day Two of “The Daily Fortune Cookie Fortune” project on Flickr. Consistency already! It should be smooth sailing from here on out.

Here’s the fortune photo, and here’s the fortune itself:

The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one other person.

So, a feel-good fortune this time out. I’ve got nothing against affirmation, but I really hope the rest of the cookies in my store-bought box keep the schmaltziness to a minimum.

This fortune strikes me as reminiscent of this quote from “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” by psychoanalytical pioneer Carl Jung:

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

I’d say there’s a certain level of magic involved in staving off the void that is “mere being”. The cookie and Jung are spiritually in accord.

If you’re already tired of following hitting, fielding, and pitching stats for your roto roster in this Major League Baseball season, maybe tracking the doings of the men behind home plate, fantasy-style is more your speed:

It is a fantasy league in which umpires are drafted, and in which they score points for you based on… the number of times they eject players or managers. There are convoluted (ok, impenetrable) scoring variations, but essentially it’s four points every time an ump “correctly” runs a guy, and minus three every time he fails to. There’s a draft, just like in more traditional leagues, and everybody I mentioned this to at The Stadium said the same thing: “Angel Hernandez gets taken first?”

It’s called the Umpire Fantasy League, but it’s more properly dubbed the Umpire Ejection Fantasy League, since the heave-ho action is the only stat that matters. Although I’d imagine a hardcore stats geek — which baseball tends to attract like no other sport — would go orgasmic over an ump league that included judgment over called strikes, balls, home-plate slides, etc.

Just when you thought fantasysportsland couldn’t get any more annoying. I don’t care if MLB’s umps should develop an awareness of their fantasy activities, and thus let that influence their ejection actions. I only hope this foolishness doesn’t spread to the other sports, including the ones I pay attention to.

Tom Otterness’ “Life Underground” is the most distinctive permanent art installation in New York’s subway system, and something I wish I had more time to actually appreciate as I zip through the L train’s 8th Avenue station.

The one thing I can’t help but notice about these scattered-about bronze sculptures: They make good use of old-style NYC subway tokens as props. Since the installation wasn’t finished until 2001, it was in place for the last couple of years of token usage, before the now-ubiquitous MetroCard took over.

Which is a good thing. I just can’t see those little figurines projecting the same whimsy if they were holding swipe-cards in their hands, or were piling up mounds of discarded cards. I don’t think anyone misses the real-thing tokens for paying transit fares, but at least the memory of them is bronzed forever.

A literary agent wonders about the appearance of a recurring locale in what she’s reading:

Why does every writer who wants some kind of mysterious setting pick Romania?

What gives? Is it the spooky Transylvania connection? Or are these authors attempting to write a roman à clef, with a poor geographical understanding of the format? You just don’t come across Eastern European memes that often in modern fiction.

Consider the above photo to be my contribution to today’s boobquake experiment. Not that that’s my rackage wrapped in a Life Savers bra — my Y chromosome, combined with a general lack of estrogen, leaves me without enough breast tissue to fill even an A-cup. But I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to re-use this stock image, in the guise of a feminist-sanctioned designated pinch-hitter. (If this set doesn’t trigger a tremor or two, I don’t know what will.)

Yes, it’s a silly and gratuitous display. But no less so than the nonsensical declaration that inspired all this boobery:

After Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi claimed last week that “immodest” babes cause earthquakes, Purdue University senior Jennifer McCreight responded by declaring this day “boobquake.”

She’s asking women nationwide to show a little skin today, hoping to prove to the sheik that a little shake never killed anyone. What started as an Internet joke has morphed into social media mayhem with more than 50,000 women expected to join the “movement” through McCreight’s website blaghag.com.

And in addition to McCreight’s blog, a #boobquake hashtag on Twitter is generating ample activity.

Maybe too ample, as today’s seismic shift in Taiwan suggests. Could that crackpot theology actually be correct? If so, I’d be willing to endure a shakier tectonic existence, in exchange for regular displays of “immodesty”.

Last week, I noticed the following messaging taped to an L train car window:

Nail Clipping:
Under no circumstances is the Subway the right place for this. The sound is incredibly annoying and the little nail bits go flying all over the place. Keep it at home please. It’s crazy that this even needs to be mentioned.

It was printed on a standard-looking, nondescript Metropolitan Transportation Authority announcement poster. Or so it would seem on first glance. That quirky “it’s crazy” closing line was the first tip-off that I was looking at a crafted piece of public-art craftiness. The second was the just-off colors of the poster, despite the dead-on font style and layout.

The third would have been the above “Metropolitan Etiquette Authority” logo, a take-off of the MTA’s stylized mark. I didn’t get close enough to the poster to scope out that subtle element. Luckily, Jay Shells, the “artivist” mastermind behind this, explains his motives online:

I surveyed 100 people on their top pet-peeves (not service related) while riding the Subway. I narrowed the results down to the top ten most occurring issues and rewrote them as a sort of list of rules. I designed posters in the style of the Service Changes posters we see everyday and silkscreened about 40 of each (400 total) and am currently putting them up on trains throughout the city, throughout this week. I encourage people to look out for them, and to take them before the MTA does.

And it turns out that Shells inaugurated his guerilla-style cleanup campaign on the L line. So I was among the first to see the posters in the wild. I can’t say I’ve suffered through any of these pet peeves to a great degree, although I’ve been riding the urban rails long enough to have been exposed to all of them. But any efforts to curb their occurrence is most welcomed.

Had I known ahead of time, I definitely would have grabbed that nail-clipping announcement, as Shells encourages. If I see it, or one of its brethren, this coming week during my now-steady L commute, I’ll nab that paper as I step off.

(Hat tip to Bobulate)

The few times I’ve caught Vancouver Canucks games on television this season, I’ve scratched my head over scenes like this one:

Who are those green-spandexed freaks? And since when did a National Hockey League game become a fair setting for plexiglass-pressing performance art?

It turns out that the Canucks Green Men are a new feature at General Motors Place. They’re not sanctioned by the arena nor the hockey team — which I’d wondered about, since they seemed so synchronized in their acrobatic penalty-box taunting. As for further details:

For the uninitiated, the Green Men were revealed by the Vancouver Sun as British Columbia Institute of Technology students Ryan Sullivan and Adam Forsythe, whose Green Men alter-egos go by Sully and Force. They initially wanted to use the “Green Man” gimmick at a Seattle Seahawks game, but the bodysuits they ordered arrived too late for the game. The NFL’s loss was the NHL’s gain.

Not that these schoolboys are being wholly original: Their Green Men inspiration came from an identical character from the television show “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”. American cultural hegemony strikes again!

If the Museum of Modern Art was counting on a classy clientele keeping their hands to themselves amidst the naked performance artists in the “Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present” exhibition, they underestimated patrons’ temptations to press the exposed flesh:

Rebecca Davis, a performer who has been out for several weeks with a back injury unrelated to the show, said she, too, had been surprised by the number of unsuitable gestures. She recalled her shock at hearing that “someone was grabbed in their private parts” the first weekend of the show, and recounted how a woman, perhaps intoxicated, clutched the fingers of the two people in “Point of Contact,” in which two immobile performers stare and point at each other.

“She was probably thinking she was playful, but the act itself seemed aggressive,” Ms. Davis said.

Maybe the offending gropers mistook MoMA for the Museum of Sex, several blocks downtown. Or maybe Abramovic should follow popular demand and stage her next retrospective in the latter museum.

A couple of pieces of wall- and window-scrawled graffiti I just spied on the west end of Bond Street that were not artfully-enough presented to be worthy of a photo (especially not with raindrops starting to come down), but whose messages bear recording nonetheless:

EVIL COMING HERE SOON – In a storefront window, anticipating (probably) a boutique to be called, yes, “Evil”.

DRENCH ME WITH YOUR GUCCI SAUCE – On the concrete building wall right next to above window. May or may not be related/inspired by.

The concept of evil, I can grasp. Getting doused by a fashion label? Literally or figuratively, it grosses me out.

One of the more persistent legends in baseball lore concerns a young Fidel Castro and his flirtation with a Major League Baseball career in the 1950s. The story goes that his pitching performance for his college team in Havana attracted the notice of a New York Giants (some say Washington Senators) scout, who promptly offered Castro a Standard Player’s Contract to play in the Giants’ system in the States. Castro, of course, turned down the offer in favor of continuing his law school studies, and the rest is history.

The implications are obvious: Had Castro opted for the life of a professional ballplayer, he wouldn’t have become a guerilla soldier in Cuba, and the Cuban Revolution never would have happened, or else never have succeeded, or else would have taken a different form (depending on how much you subscribe to the Great Man Theory of history). Speculation on Castro’s personal trajectory favors his ascension to the Majors, making his baseball-diamond pursuit a favored subject of alternate-history fiction, notably in John Kessel’s 1993 short story “The Franchise” (in which he faces off against a similarly-alternated George Herbert Walker Bush in the 1959 World Series).

It’s all an entertaining what-if scenario. Unfortunately, according to Yale professor Roberto González Echevarría, author of “The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball”, it doesn’t hold up because there’s no evidence to support it:

Let it be known here that Fidel Castro was never scouted by any major-league team, and is not known to have enjoyed the kind of success in baseball that could have brought a scout’s attention to him. In a country where sports coverage was broad and thorough, in a city such as Havana with a half-dozen major newspapers (plus dozens of minor ones) and with organized leagues at all levels, there is no record that Fidel Castro ever played, much less starred, on any team. No one has produced even one team picture with Fidel Castro in it. I have found the box score of an intramural game played between the Law and the Business Schools at the University of Havana where a certain F. Castro pitched and lost, 5-4, in late November 1946; this is likely to be the only published box score in which the future dictator appears (El Mundo, November 28, 1946). Cubans know that Fidel Castro was no ballplayer, though he dressed himself in the uniform of a spurious, tongue-in-cheek team called Barbudos (Bearded Ones) after he came to power in 1959 and played a few exhibition games.

Echevarría attributes the MLB story to “a fabrication by an American journalist whose name is now lost”. I’m guessing that Castro’s post-revolution Barbudos appearances spurred some speculation about his baseball prowess, which led to the tall tales. Thus, a legend (more properly, a myth) was born.

I’m disappointed. I’d accepted the Castro baseball story, having come across various manifestations of it over the years. I even recall reading quotes from the alleged scout who tried to recruit Castro, with him noting that it was “unusual” for a Latin American prospect to turn down an MLB offer in those days. As unusual as the entire account, apparently.