The sidewalks of New York

Thousands of maps detail the various hundreds of thousands of imperfections in the sidewalks of New York. Whence these maps? They are the work of the the improbably-titled Big Apple Pothole and Sidewalk Protection Committee, an organization created by the New York State Trial Lawyers Association:

They were conceived by a group of trial lawyers who hired a mapping company to scour the streets and sketch every crack, chink and pothole, with the ostensible purpose of giving the city notice of potential hazards it must fix, or face the consequences. When someone fell and was injured on a city sidewalk — the most frequent ground for a personal-injury lawsuit against the city — he could present the map in court as hard evidence of the city’s liability.

City officials have long attacked the maps as nothing more than a useless collection of "700,000 squiggles," created by greedy lawyers, that has forced them to parse the intricacies of geometry — is that line horizontal or vertical? — and cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars in damage awards and settlements.

But now, a recent court ruling has dug a sizable gouge in the pothole map.

In a decision issued Dec. 18, the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, for the first time echoed the city's argument that the maps are inaccurate and unclear.

Ruling Deals a Setback to Sidewalk Injury Lawsuits in New York (New York Times)

In this recent case, the Times reports, a judge wrote that one of the squiggles in question resembled "a poorly drawn X, the Hebrew letter shin, or a pitchfork without the handle."

[Why "improbably-titled"? "Protection Committee" has a presumably unintentional — and to my mind hilarious — overtone of organized-crime rackets. And only out-of-towners still speak of the "Big Apple."]

David Levine on enjoyment

Artist and illustrator David Levine, from an October 23, 2008 C-SPAN interview:

"Enjoying is very important. If there's nothing else but your enjoyment, you've got a lot."

Pre-chewed pencils

"We know it's a bit daft but — hey!"

From Concentrate Design, pre-chewed pencils.

"You gotta get up in the morning"

Spike Lee averages almost a movie a year. From "Outside Man," a September 22, 2008 New Yorker profile by John Colapinto:

He is able to accomplish so much in part because he often rises at 5 A.M. "You want to get a lot done, you gotta get up in the morning," he told me. The rest, he says, is "time management."

Economies of time (Hi and Lois)

Everyone's economizing: in Hi and Lois, months now have twenty-eight (or fewer?) days.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

2008 first-sentences meme

I'm not much for memes, but I like this one, which I found at Robert Gable's aworks: go through your 2008 blog entries and and collect the first sentence from each month. It's an exercise in parataxis. Thus:

Small calendars for the new year, well designed and free. Alas, it's a parking area that's reserved. Victoria's Secret likes to ask in its marketing, "What is sexy?" Whoso would be a G-Man must be a pencil user, as Emerson might have put it. A light cigarette is like a regular one with a pinhole in it. In April, Odette at Reading Proust in Foxborough linked to a fine post from On-Screen Scientist, detailing one reader's initial inspiration for reading Proust: the words of 1950s quarterback Ronnie Knox, as quoted in the November 3, 1958 issue of Sports Illustrated. In eraserdom, black is the new pink. Our attention spans are notoriously short. September 1, 2008 is the day Hurricane Gustav made landfall. It's "Main Street." What if he loses? The Simpsons razz Apple: "Oh, such beautiful packaging!"

"Victoria's Secret" is from a Wall Street Journal article; "A light cigarette," from a New Yorker piece by David Sedaris; "Our attention spans," from Gordon Livingston's Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart. The final sentence quotes Lisa Simpson. The other sentences are mine.

JANUARY (WPA Art Project)

[Poster from the Illinois WPA Art Project, artist unknown. Stamped on the back: January 8, 1941. Via the Library of Congress online exhibit By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943.]

Happy New Year, and good reading to all.

I'm reading Dickens, Bleak House. You?

"Auld Lang Syne"

From 1964, the Beach Boys, channeling the Four Freshmen:

"Auld Lang Syne" (YouTube)

Goodbye, year.

Chocolate, wine, tea

Hail flavonoids:

According to Oxford researchers working with colleagues in Norway, chocolate, wine and tea enhance cognitive performance.

The team from Oxford's Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Norway examined the relation between cognitive performance and the intake of three common foodstuffs that contain flavonoids (chocolate, wine, and tea) in 2,031 older people (aged between 70 and 74).

Participants filled in information about their habitual food intake and underwent a battery of cognitive tests. Those who consumed chocolate, wine, or tea had significantly better mean test scores and lower prevalence of poor cognitive performance than those who did not. The team reported their findings in the Journal of Nutrition.

Chocolate, Wine And Tea Improve Brain Performance (Science Daily, via Lifehacker)

The article goes on to caution of course that it's moderate alcohol consumption that's associated with improved cognitive function — the sort of cognitive function involved in noticing that "chocolate, wine, and tea" are out of alphabetical order or that there's something amusing about the series "Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Norway."

A fifth Jane Austen character speaks

Miss Crawford, you play the harp. Do you know whether the Misses Owen are, any of them, musical?

"That is the first question, you know," said Miss Crawford, trying to appear gay and unconcerned, "which every woman who plays herself is sure to ask about another. But it is very foolish to ask questions about any young ladies — about any three sisters just grown up; for one knows, without being told, exactly what they are — all very accomplished and pleasing, and one very pretty. There is a beauty in every family. — It is a regular thing. Two play on the piano-forte, and one on the harp — and all sing — or would sing if they were taught — or sing all the better for not being taught — or something like it."

From Mansfield Park (1814)

Having come to the end of the novel, I realize that the amusing bits of dialogue I've posted are likely to mislead. Though a comedy ("happy ending"), Mansfield Park is a dark novel, encompassing despair, greed, infidelity, isolation, poverty, and (at a great distance) slavery. Troubling too is the novel's emphasis, in its strange final chapter, on contingency: while giving the reader the anticipated ending, the narrator also points out that nothing that has happened had to have happened — the characters' lives might have been worked out in other, equally satisfactory ways.

Related posts
A Jane Austen character speaks
A second Jane Austen character speaks
A third Jane Austen character speaks
A fourth Jane Austen character speaks