Everything is So Important

My sister-in-law sent me this. Ah, New Yorkers:

So I spent most of the week traveling, first to Philadelphia and then to Chicago. The trips were purely business: I had very little time outside of my hotel room or the shiny office facilities to which we shuffled back and forth to walk around or whatever. (Which is not really that big a deal, I've been to both places before. Plus Chicago was fucking cold.) Anyway, it occurred to me as I watched folks in both cities going to and from work etc. that part of the reason I'm not fit to be anywhere else but New York has something to do with the pace. I mean, the people elsewhere are doing the same things I'm doing: waking up hungover, dealing with soul-crushingly quotidian tasks like shaving and taking vitamins and smoking and sitting under fluorescent lights for nine hours until they can go home, etc. But we do it at a much faster speed here, because everything is so important. I think what's so depressing about Real America is when you look at what you do at half-speed you realize, holy shit, who gives a fuck? I'd rather be kept in my cocoon of intensity, where it seems like all the ridiculous stuff I'm bouncing around each day actually, you know, matters. Also, people are much fatter there.

Oh The Things You Will See!

This past weekend marked the birthday of Dr. Seuss, who was writing ad copy ("Standard Oil Company hired him to create monsters that live in the car, and he created the Moto-raspus, the Moto-munchus, and the Karbo-nockus") until 1937, when he published the book that would launch his career: And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street. Though Theodor Geisel's Mulberry Street is in Massachusetts, the strange sights of New York's own Mulberry Street have likewise provided considerable creative inspiration to many -- as evidenced by Mulberry Street, the movie, in which virulent rats turn people into zombies with their bites (Variety definitively named it "a cut above most zero-budget horrors"). I saw it at the Tribeca Film Festival last May, and I can assure you it delivers all the horror it promises. Out on DVD mid-March!

On Cold Showers

I like my gym -- convenient hours and locations, well-maintained facilities, boppin' tunes, weight-loss advice that in fact works (if you follow it), etc. etc. (did I mention the hairdryers? the hairdryers are great). But if I have one complaint, it's that sometimes the showers turn icy cold without warning. Why does this happen? And, more importantly, why does this happen to me? Well, as BoingBoing kindly explains, when the gym is crowded, no one is spared. Here's why cold water indifferently rains down on the svelte and not-so-svelte alike:

Christina Matzke at the University of Bonn in Germany and Damien Challet of the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy, used a mathematical model to show that shower temperature becomes increasingly sensitive to small changes in hot-water flow as the number of users increases. Thus in a youth hostel, for example, the showers often fluctuate between scalding hot and ice cold during heavy use. 

Annoying (even if that burst of cold water protects one's sanity).