The above photo is from today’s New York Daily News article on the residential/merchant displacements caused by Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards project. I find this visual — a bunch of padlocks “strung” together in a row on a construction-site chain-link fence — that I wanted to preserve it here (and on Flickr).

It’s not explicitly stated, but I got the impression from the article that this arrangement of locks represents a protest by the locals against the neighborhood disruption. If so, it’s a creative way to get the point across. I’m sure I’ve seen this before, although it couldn’t have been more than 3-4 locks grouped together; anything more than that would have piqued my curiosity before coming upon this image.

Am I missing the boat, and this chain-linking of locks is common-knowledge way of expressing discontent? I don’t know if there’s a clear symbolism: Are the protesters “locking out” the transgressors, figuratively or concretely? Or is it simply a relatively cheap and tamper-proof way to plant a protest symbol?

Spring is in the air in New York, so that must mean it’s time for the City’s official condoms to get a provocative wrapper-redesign:

More than 15,000 online voters have spoken: City-sponsored condoms will come packaged with a computer power button logo. “There’s a subtle message in the shape, so I figured if I don’t get disqualified, it will work great,” said contest winner Luis Acosta, a 29-year-old graphic designer…

His limited-edition design won 23% of the vote, with others running close. A top hat earned 21%; a colorful circle design won 20%. A manhole cover and a train design got 19% and 17%, respectively.

Congratulations, Department of Health. For the next year, no one in the five boroughs will be able to start up their power-buttoned tech devices without letting loose a phallic-inspired giggle.

I have to admit, that humble circular-stick icon does suggest an at-attention member. The “sac” hanging below is probably too round to represent the average male’s package, but stylization trumps anatomy when it comes to symbolism. Makes me wonder if some hardware-designing geek didn’t have this interpretation in mind years ago, and it took this prophylactic application to make us all catch on.

It’s been said before, so why not say it again: New York City’s Internet industry is on a comeback trail.

“Book publishing, advertising, media and even the fashion industry are all located in New York. These are the main industries that are being reshaped and redefined by technology and the Internet,” says AnnaLee Saxenian, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies regional economics and technology entrepreneurship.

To get a vivid snapshot of this new generation of Web innovation, one needs to look no further than the portfolio of Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures and a force within the New York start-up scene. Run through a list of Web darlings here — Boxee, software that pipes video from the Internet to a television; Tumblr, a microblogging platform; and Foursquare, a mobile social network — and Union Square is an investor.

“The software business has morphed into the Internet business,” Mr. Wilson says. “Ten years ago, maybe 80 percent of software was being built for enterprise. Now, it’s being written for consumers and is more media-centric than ever. And, historically, those have been New York’s strongest sectors.”

The thing is, the same claim was made exactly four years ago. That’s where the accompanying map came from; many of those lean-running operations are still around, and are thriving. Either this latest declaration of five-borough tech-blooming is the result of a critical mass having been established in the middle of the past decade, or else the concept is simply being periodically recycled.

…And we’re back.

Anyone who pokes around this URL on a regular basis knows that there’s only one rule, content-wise: At least one post per day, every day. So the past two days of blog silence — the first since mid-2008 — should have a good reason behind them, right?

Well, they do: A big, honkin’ winter storm that dumped a couple of feet of snow hereabouts, and managed to knock out my Internet connection from Thursday night through to this afternoon. Yep, total Web (and, incidentally, cable TV) silence for an extended weekend. And I was obliged to stay home that whole time too, venturing outside only for short sprints — but, alas, nowhere close enough for a reliable Web access point.

It pretty much sucked. I can’t say it was unbearable, but it was definitely a major drag. I had a load of work to do, and basically couldn’t do it until today. So I’ve been scrambling to catch up, finally finishing less than an hour ago.

Not that I didn’t find ways to fend off the snowbound ennui. I acquainted myself with my new, barely-used Blu-ray DVD player, discovering that it can play music CDs — although it can’t read some of the extra media (music videos, basically) loaded onto older, turn-of-the-century discs. I also used it to re-acquaint myself with some of my DVD collection, taking in episodes of “The Larry Sanders Show” and “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”, along with an overdue re-viewing of The Falcon and the Snowman.

And now, to complete this crippled weekend’s entertainment: I’m restarting the consecutive blogging streak. Let’s see how long this one can go before Mother Nature intervenes.

How much of a jolt is yesterday’s announced $1.08-billion sale of local pharmacy chain Duane Reade to Walgreen to New Yorkers?

Well, not that much, really. True, Duane Reades are one of those far-too-ubiquitous cornerstore fixtures in Manhattan, right there with bank branches and Starbucks. And I suppose there’s some provincial pride in having a locally-sprouted business always within footsteps — even when those footsteps take you between competing corners on Broadway, as the photo above illustrates.

But at the end of the day, it’s just another retailer, and so it doesn’t engender all that much sentimentality among the locals. And it’s not like New Yorkers will “lose” those Duane Reade signs, as Walgreen intends to keep the brand alive after acquisition (although I’m betting that within five years, that’s go out the window, and those 257 stores will be transformed into generic ol’ Walgreens). The main plus side is that people living on Duane and Reade Streets will, at some point, not get their packages erroneously delivered to some random drugstore.

In a fairly staid commercial lineup for Super Bowl XLIV, the clear winner for me was this utterly improbable pairing of David Letterman and Jay Leno (with Oprah in the moderating middle):

Maybe even funnier than the ad itself is the lengths taken to keep its inception secret:

The spot was shot last Tuesday afternoon, under the strictest of secrecy which involved both Mr. Leno and Ms. Winfrey flying in surreptitiously to New York, and arriving incognito at the [Ed Sullivan Theater], while Mr. Letterman was in the midst of taping his show for that night. It also involved Jay wearing a disguise: hooded sweatshirt, glasses and faux mustache. If you happened to be on Broadway between 53rd and 54th street last Tuesday about 4:15, you might have seen a man fitting that description slip into the theater by a small entrance under the marquee.

All that for a “Late Show with David Letterman” promo. And it basically topped every other $3-million, 30-second spot of the night. Dave might have been complaining about his “worst Super Bowl party ever”, but it produced the best commercial break during the whole game.

Once upon a time, the announcement of a new telephone area code was a big deal, especially in a major city like New York.

Now? Ho-hum. Between number overlays and location-independent cellphones, those first three digits don’t mean an awful lot anymore. Sure, a metropolitan-based telephone prefix certainly retains some luster, especially the iconic (212). But it’s a fading currency. The cultural impact of telephony protocol touches us less and less, it seems.

So the rollout of the new outer-borough (929) code later this year won’t change much. Other than giving rappers a new callout-combo for geo-rhyming. Or making bridge-and-tunnelers that much more self-conscious when slipping their phone numbers to new acquaintances.

Once the province of boxers in training, raw eggs have been a chic ingredient in New York City cocktails for the past year. So it was only a matter of time before the city cracked down on all this eggshell-cracking mixology:

Nevertheless, on that fateful evening, an inspector from the New York City Department of Health cited Pegu Club, at 77 West Houston Street in SoHo, for serving the [Earl Grey MarTEAni] without telling the customer who ordered it that it contained raw egg. The notice said it was a serious infraction that required a court appearance.

I’m all for adventuresome imbibing. Still, I’m kinda glad that the brakes are being applied here. When I’m ordering a martini — even a tea-infused one, which I’d totally dig — I’m not necessarily looking for another avant-garde additive in the glass. Although the rationale is enlightening:

“The tannins in tea, alone, can build up on your palate and exhaust it — which is one of the reasons why many people drink tea with milk and lemon,” she said. “The egg white in this drink achieves the same feat, without the potentially coating effect that you’d get from milk or cream. The raw egg white adds an ethereal mouth feel, much like a foamy mousse — the raw egg white has the ability to aerate into a much greater volume than pasteurized could.”

A heady mixture, indeed. But I’ll stick to the less-modulated chemical reactions that come from alcohol intake, sans chicken ovum. The eggs will still be there the next morning, to do their job in cutting through the hangover haze.

One of the more popular stories in the local paper of record last week involved the simultaneous deaths of two much-beloved doggies on the Upper West Side.

With all due respect to the outpouring of grief up on West 86th Street, I submit the accompanying photo as proof that the Lower East Side really knows how to mourn the passing of Man’s Best Friend. Not to get all crosstown-rivalry, but what’s a more fitting tribute: A toast of hoity-toity Champagne, or a kick-ass cornerstore mural?

This security-shutter painting, “In Loving Memory of Drew, Love the LES”, is a familiar sight on the corner of 1st Avenue and 2nd Street. Despite the rush I was in and the chill in the air, today just felt like the right day to finally whip out my cameraphone and take the shot. It turned out surprisingly better than I’d hoped.

I never knew Drew. Judging from his regal bearing, I’m sure he was more than deserving of this public commemoration.

While Manhattan has just successfully spurned the potentially-disruptive Federal trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, my upstate hometown is ready to take the rebound as the new venue.

The offer is not driven by a sense of justice, so much:

“If they want to have it here, we’ve got the state-of-the-art courthouse,” [Newburgh, NY] Mayor Nicholas Valentine — a Republican — told radio host Curtis Sliwa this morning. “I’ll offer it to them, but there’s got to be money attached.”

He cited the figure of $200 million floated by New York City officials.

“Two hundred million and something dollars to Newburgh would completely change this city around. It would double my police force. It would pay off my debt,” Valentine said. “Maybe it’s just crazy enough that we could pull something like this off.”

Given the town’s previous brush with quasi-Islamic terrorism, I’d say the “crazy” rating is pretty high in this instance. A money-grab for hosting a media-circus public tribunal? I think we can slot this proposal under the “this is why the terrorists hate us” category.

I was quite amused today to see a copy of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue: An American Life” sitting on dashboard of my morning bus, obviously in possession of the bus driver.

Because it was all too obvious that he was practically brandishing the hardcover, making sure that every rider that got onboard had a good view of it. Between that, and the staredowns he was administering, I’m pretty sure the driver was daring someone, anyone, to challenge him on it. Given the well-known proclivities of a good cross-section of New Yorkers, I’d imagine the odds are good that he got into more than one verbal joust with various passengers during his shift.

All I can say is that, during my half-hour trip, no one took the bait. Not that you could tell the difference by the driver’s customarily crabby demeanor.

Good to know that you can find made-to-order vampiric mouthware in the East Village/Alphabet City area. That’s where I cameraphoned this storefront-window sign the other day (closer to life-sized in embiggened Flickr version).

I won’t say where the “here” in that “Custom Vampire Fangs Made Here” is. Because I don’t want this little corner of Manhattan to get overrun by deep-end Twilight groupies who are looking for a thrill. Although given the neighborhood, it’d be fun to see those little fanboys/girls come face-to-face with the less-than-romantic urban vampires that’d frequent this literal body-shop…

Aside from the municipal debt-load, what does Donald Trump think is New York’s most pressing problem heading into the new year? Guardrails:

“Whenever I drive the roads in this city, I see these terrible, truly awful guardrails. They’re dented, they’re broken, some of them are completely rusted out. To me, it’s supposed to go hand in hand: You fix the roads and then you fix the guardrails simultaneously, but it doesn’t seem to happen that way. So debt and the guardrails — but almost more, I’d say the guardrails. The guardrails are just in such bad shape.”

Funny what you see from a limo’s-eye view. Maybe those unsightly guardrails scare that thing on his head…

Nearly a week after all the blizzard-like conditions, there’s still ample amounts of snow and slush in the streets of New York, and I’m still bitching about it.

But at least someone has a sense of whimsy about the lingering cold-and-wet stuff that’s impeding us pedestrians. I snapped the above photo today on Park Avenue, around 38th Street (bigger version on Flickr). Not even in a residential neighborhood, which was the biggest surprise of all. I’m sure it was quite a task to roll up the remnant sidewalk snow into an entire (if short) snowman, but the result was well worth it.

Judging from the melty halo surrounding him, I doubt this urban snowman will last more than a couple more days. Considering he’s fairly displaced in midtown Manhattan anyway, that he sprung up at all is remarkable enough.

So, two days after the Blizzard of ‘09 — which was so gosh-darn big that it was notably visible from outer space — I found my day’s pedestrian commute to be strewn with extended patches of snow and ice.

And I can’t figure out a justifiable reason for that. Yeah, it was a “blizzard”, but the brunt of it hit the southern end of the metro area. Manhattan got a fair amount of inches dumped upon it, but it was a benign dumping — no swirling winds and heavy snowfall to make cleanup extra difficult. I don’t understand why the sidewalks should still be treacherously slippery after more than a full day of cleanup opportunity.

Maybe all the build-up over impending “blizzard conditions” instilled a defeatist attitude in the area’s public works employees. They were expecting a knock-you-out storm, and even when that didn’t quite happen, they reacted as though it had. And since the public was just as pre-conditioned to the preemptive panic, no one’s raising the fuss that they should over the half-assed job that’s taking place. It could be the same dynamic I experienced all too often during Floridian hurricane panic-season. Oversaturated coverage of atmospheric conditions leads to irrational reactions.

Or maybe I’m just engaging in my usual wintry-weather bitching. It’s all relative.

At one point during dinner last night at La Bonne Soupe (where I, somewhat ironically, did not have the soup), I was convinced that Sarah Silverman was sitting just a couple of tables over.

Then the woman got up to leave, and I could see clearly that it wasn’t her. I mean, it was certainly her, in that she was whoever she was. But she wasn’t Sarah Silverman.

I dejectedly turned my attention back to my table’s post-dessert chit-chat. I’m pretty sure my dining companions hadn’t noticed my preoccupation, nor my subsequent disappointment.

News of former First Daughter Chelsea Clinton getting engaged triggered this never-before-realization by me:

Everyone’s heard of New York’s a-little-too-hip Chelsea neighborhood. And everyone’s heard of (in one way or another) the nearby Hell’s Kitchen section of town.

What not everyone might know is that these two zones are, in fact, adjacent to one another. And furthermore, efforts to gentrify Hell’s Kitchen have led to a mostly real-estate bred movement to replace the colorful moniker with “Clinton”, which is in fact the historical name of the area.

So, you can see where this is going. Yes, you can indeed stroll from the 20s to the 50s on the West Side, and correctly claim to have taken a “Chelsea-Clinton walk”. Or a “Chelsea-Hell’s walk”, either way.

I’m not above:

a) Broadcasting my bitching about the stereotypical unpleasantness of a work-week Monday;
b) Plagiarizing my own tweetstream.

And so the two converged this morning, to this:

fierce dragon-breath mixed with cheap perfume. Hello there, Monday.

A few syllables short of haiku status. Maybe if I’d stayed on the bus a few minutes longer, I’d have been more descriptive. The downside of mass transit, if only briefly so.

Because it’s never too early to instill exam-related stress on the young ‘uns, Manhattan parents are paying for test-prep courses to help their little tykes make the cut for exclusive kindergarten classes.

Test preparation has long been a big business catering to students taking SATs and admissions exams for law, medical and other graduate schools. But the new clientele is quite a bit younger: 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.

Motivated by a recession putting private schools out of reach and concern about the state of regular public education, parents — some wealthy, some not — are signing up at companies like Bright Kids NYC. Bright Kids, which opened this spring in the financial district, has some 200 students receiving tutoring, most of them for the gifted exams, for up to $145 a session and 80 children on a waiting list for a weekend “boot camp” program.

I wonder how strenuous the finger-painting training is — are there tips for optimal digit-dexterity under 5 years of age?

I must have been too busy ducking paraskevidekatriaphobia on Friday, or else I would have been all over this year’s November 13th observance of Odd Couple Day.

Lamentably, I was unaware of this dubious holiday, even though years of rerun-watching should have ingrained the show’s opening narration into my brain:

On November 13, Felix Unger was asked to remove himself from his place of residence; that request came from his wife. Deep down, he knew she was right, but he also knew that some day he would return to her. With nowhere else to go, he appeared at the home of his friend, Oscar Madison. Several years earlier, Madison’s wife had thrown HIM out, requesting that HE never return. Can two divorced men share an apartment without driving each other crazy?

I’ll have to remember for next year. Hopefully, local TV station and traditional “Odd Couple” repository WPIX Channel 11 will repeat the marathon of episodes it ran late-night Friday/Saturday; or better yet, start showing reruns on a regular basis, and at saner hours. While they’re at it, they should come up with a better lineup of episodes than what they chose this time around. I’d love to see the Howard Cosell guest-spots again, so I could relive Cosell’s “inane drone” insult to Felix:

When Oscar asks Felix to explain the term, Felix searches for a meaning and says, “Well, it’s a dull bee.” Oscar agrees.

Drone on, dull bee, drone on. And you too, Oscar Madisoy.

If nothing else, wasting time on Facebook provides you with a legally-binding criminal-defense alibi:

[Rodney Bradford's] defense lawyer, Robert Reuland, told a Brooklyn assistant district attorney, Lindsay Gerdes, about the Facebook entry, which was made at the time of the robbery. The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook to verify that the words had been typed from a computer at an apartment at 71 West 118th Street in Manhattan, the home of Mr. Bradford’s father. When that was confirmed, the charges were dropped.

“This is the first case that I’m aware of in which a Facebook update has been used as alibi evidence,” said John G. Browning, a lawyer in Dallas who studies social networking and the law. “We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become.”

Not that visitor logs can’t be spoofed, or anything. I’m sure the law will catch up eventually.