What made you smile today?

Mmm, smile, I dunno, perhaps more bemused..

Sark is one of the (many) cafes that has Wifi. I walked past Sark just now. There was a car just beyond. People sitting in it, I glanced in. Man sitting behind the steering wheel; woman on the passenger seat, laptop on her lap, typing away.

Tony Blair ageing 25 years in 25 hours

spent the late afternoon and early evening with two of my best friends in the world, their kids, dogs, cats and horses

Set and my dogs got along with their pack very well.

I've known the husband of the couple since we were 6 years old. The wife of the couple's been my best friend since we were 14 or 15. I usually see her once or twice a year now, and him every 3 or 4 years.

Being able to pick up a conversation with them is just so ... easy. Love it. Seeing any of them makes me smile.

Sitting with their 12 year old son while he practiced his trumpet, after he made Setanta a cup of coffee ... made me smile and smile.

"smile" isn't the right word; and neither is "bemuse." I am still looking for the right word.

There is a major bus stop on Main Street in front of my store. A busy bus stop.

And as it happens my building is back from the street a bit. Perhaps 15 feet or so. There is a raised planter maybe 4' wide and 12' long with flowers in it and capped with a sitting area on the perimeter. The sitting area is painted a deep, deep red.

I came into work at 7 am on Thursday morning and noticed that on the dark red planter was a shoe. A white shoe, or maybe more of a sandal. It was all of 3 inches long. A kid's shoe that belonged on some kid's right foot but that had come off.
It was still there on Friday and is still there today, Saturday. The shoe is so white and so small, waiting on this deep, deep red bench to be claimed.
Most everyone who walks by never notices it. But some do. They pause. They ponder it. It is so white and so small and is on a deep, deep red background.
No one touches it, but I did see someone take a picture of it.

That shot was prolly begging to be made....

The pictures I took of my friends on my phone while we were all pissed in the pub last night.

x

The New Yorker arrived in my mailbox, whew! I'd mailed in my check after the expiration date of the offer at a much lower than usual subscription rate.
I'm not entirely sanguine in the world without the ballast of the weekly NY'er, and I haven't renewed my subscription for some months. It's $4.00, well, 3.99, an issue on the newstand, that is if one gets to one of the few newstands that have it in this city, and, with this subscription, something like 63 cents an issue.

I went in to my shop on Sunday morning to get things set up for the crew of staffers who work the four hours we are open. I noticed that the little white shoe had taken a tumble and was on the ground. I picked it up and wiped it clean on my jeans. I put it back where it belonged, on the deep red bench. Well, not where it belonged, of course. It belonged on some kid's right foot. I put it back where it was.
It was gone this morning.

A year or two ago I wrote on A2K about the same planter. One morning I came in and found a pair of wooden crutches. I left them there for a day or so and then moved them inside. I eventually called some charity and they came and got them. The notion of who they might have belonged to and how it happened that they could be no longer needed and could be discarded on Main Street occupied my mind for several days.

Osso, you write of the New Yorker. When I was a lad of about 15, my parents were friends with a retired couple who lived about 20 miles from C'ville. When there was a forecast of heavy snow (back when we had snow) they would stay with us in town. Perfect guests; never expecting to be entertained. They would bring their books and some of their classical music records and they would pretty much disappear. Mrs D turned me on to the New Yorker. She not only passed on the current issues when she was finished with them, but she had a huge collection of back issues that she gave me.
A number of years later, when I was in Vietnam, she would clip out stories that she thought I might enjoy and send them to me each week.
I don't know if the new New Yorker is anywhere as good as the old New Yorker. But I do know that my enjoyment of reading and writing is due in no small part to that magazine.

What a great friend Mrs D was to you!

I found out today that my little sister will be having a baby boy in February (I'd known about the due date, but not the gender).

Sorry to hear you were crying, nimh. It's a b***ch when that happens.

I have a screen saver on my laptop which randomly goes through all photographs saved on it...

A minute ago a picture of my best friend came up.
We were playing cards two years ago and I caught her, really excited after she had just won a round.

The memory made me smile!

I smiled when I saw this clip today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBhthYkHMrg

I don't think I've seen anything sexier than Napstergirl. I wonder if anyone else has..

Your avatar made me smile, finalspike. Love it.
Welcome to A2K, too!

Where's nimh? What was the name of that video-blog you were talking about being viral?

Oh wow i had to do a search on my own posts to realise what you referred to, i could not remember having said anything about "viral"!

But - got it now. Lonelygirl15. The lonelygirl15 character has been revealed as, well, a character, and not a real person - as those suspicious bloggers who had already "suggested she was part of a viral marketing campaign for a film or computer game" had guessed.

(That's "viral marketing campaign" - nothing to do with viruses, in case anyone was worried).

More here: OMG! The unmasking-of-the-Lonelygirl15-phenomenon phenomenon

Oopsie.... well, thanks for the response......

(yesterday)

Bicycling out toward Angyalfold; see kids playing on the sidewalk. Perhaps it's trash day tomorrow or the day after, there's a crapload of cardboard and some foam plastic outside. They've built a proper hut from it, less than a metre high but over two metres long, and crawl in, out, run about.

Havent seen something like that in ages..

(still yesterday)

There's this little commuter station, not far out at all, only in the first orb of neighbourhoods outside the city centre. It's perched right in the middle of nowhere between Angyalföld and Herminamező, on a cobblestone road that dissappears into the dark past a couple of defunct level crossing barriers that lean up like curved goodbyes, toward a highrise or two in the distance. On the other side, another level crossing, this one with the barriers perpetually down, only cyclists and pedestrians carelessly rounding them and crossing the tracks. Behind it leafy streets with low, neglected-looking houses and some four-or five-story apartment blocks from the fifties or sixties. A woman leans out from the ground floor window of one, chatting with a man who is standing outside.

The station is called Rákosrendező, the station building is a dusty reddish brown hulk. To its back, overgrown tracks. At its front, a single platform, a dozen people waiting in the yellowing light. And by the crossing, a really cool little büfé. Couple of wooden tables and benches. Few plastic chair on the gravel under the lean-to. The shed-like building has two small, open windows, one for "ételek", or food, and one for "italok", or drinks. The available food consists of a few stale cheese muffins and thick buns with unidentifiable meat, all wrapped in plastic. Nobody's buying. They come for drinks: cold cans of beer, small bottles of liquor, for cheap. One step up from the plastic Coke bottles with something yellowish and strong that you see people on the street with sometimes.

Behind the windows, a young teenage girl is bored but not unfriendly. Men shake hands, three are sitting on the plastic chairs and talking. On each of the four wooden tables, there's one man, almost in regimented formation. Each looking into the distance, over or past the ramshackle street, level crossing barriers and station building, or at his drink, before, after 15 or 20 minutes, getting up with a gravel grumble of the bench and going on his way again. An older man and a younger man sit on my bench overlooking it all, their conversation drifts in and out, Hungarian homebrew language, turns of phrases I make no effort to understand.

A woman in high spirits ambles over to the older man, greets him as jovially as that homeless girl in Utrecht always greeted me, and follows up with the same line: do you have 200 forints for me? Eighty cents? I'll pay it back next time.. The man waves away the latter, gathers some coins from his pocket. The man in black who had been sitting, hunched over, at one of the four tables, joins them, also in ebullient if poor-looking spirits. Your son, he asks, like the woman had a moment earlier, pointing to the younger man, and again the older man says, no, my friend. The woman offers him something to eat, but he declines, I've already eaten.. again, the conversation drifts in and out, I look over the ramshackle street, the level crossing barriers, the station building. On the right, down the street, there's a small cabin, inside glowing light, a man working perhaps. "Rantott hus," the older man's voice goes, fried meat, and potatoes..

Ah, Id forgotten, this is the weekend they have the pre-event for the European Car-Free Day on the 22nd. They had it last year too.

Charming, again - the Andrassy Boulevard emptied of traffic, and instead a mile of pleasant and slightly environmentalist family entertainment. Very... Berlin, somehow, Amsterdam. The through another.

A small stage with folk music, lots of artisan stands, but also one that has furniture out of recycled paper. Bouncy castles and giant slides for the kids, lots of kids running and giggling and screeching with laughter everywhere. Weird kinds of bikes in all sizes that you can try out, a stern exhibit of crashed cars of the traffic safety department. There's an actual mini rail track with one of those riding platforms that you have to move yourself down the track by pushing and pulling this giant lever (this is where my English falls short); including a girl on the threshold of her teen years in railway uniform, saluting at a reproduction crossover. A DJ playing thumping techno to a small group of crusties and machos gradually mixing together for a mini streetrave, others alongside are juggling, and dancing with these wistful circling thin ropes with pieces of colored cloth. All this right smack down in the centre of town, on the city's grandest boulevard. There's even a small, improvised-looking debate or Q 'n' A going on in front of twenty or thirty young people on wooden benches, cameras and photographers thronging around the speaker - mayor Gabor Demszky, himself?

Over by the City Park there's a second big stage, with more low-brow entertainment. Two white Hungarian rappers, very MC Miker G and DJ Sven (ie, not very hip-hop at all), are bouncing up and down, faces in the crowd are chanting along with their refrains. Bouncing right along next to them on stage is a middle-aged woman in a rather unflattering long, wide dress, who translates every rhyme right into sign language. She does the same for the next act, a female singer who sings Hungarian-language versions of well-known cheesy Euro tearjerkers and sing-alongs. She's dressed in a garish blue jacket with 1980s shoulderpads, and those big golden buttons on the front, like those on the stereotypical VVD-er's blue blazer. Her songs sound almost Dutch, and people in the audience, unfashionable to a man, sing and dance along and are happy. They made me feel suddenly very homesick for "De Haag" and Dutch tearjerker "smartlappen" songs.

Earlier, the stage on Kodaly Korund at the end of the car-free boulevard was still empty, the music from the speakers coming from CD. Later, a Hungarian band would play quite faithfully retroproduced seventies funk and disco; the pretty, vain boy singing and playing lead guitar attracting a little fan circle of his own, four, five girls dancing and giggling out in front. For now, just some people milling about.

Two of them are walking ads, lumbering along in these twice-life sized plastic blow-up figures - you know, like in Disney land you have giant Goofy and Mickey walking around. These ones have little arms and hands and otherwise look more like giant blue condoms, advertising the services of a bank. They mostly just stand around. But then the music changes to hip-hop, and the one guy inside is quickly getting jiggy with it, grooving this way and that and stamping his feet to the beat. Wandering around almost falling over a little kid. As the rapper croons, If youre gonna give it to me, I'm gonna give it to you, the walking condom jiggles in a particularly lavicsious way, and gestures at two girls on the sidewalk - here, here, come here. They scatter in furious giggles. He steals up to a couple of middleaged women who miraculously dont see him coming, and when he gives them a courtly bow, one gamely dances a round or two with him. Off he is already to his next target, shuffling mischievously - two pretty young things standing with a guy over there, on the curb.. If youre gonna give it to me, I'm gonna give it to you..

What made me smile?

This happened yesterday but it made me smile just thinking about it todya.

I have the inability to draw the symbol '&'.My brain just wont do it.
Whenever I try to write '&' it ends up as the £ sign and for some reason I find it hilariously funny.