Saturday Night Live!

Melissa and I just got some unexpected good news. We applied several months ago for tickets to Saturday Night Live and we just received confirmation we are going to the show October 2nd, the second show of the season!

We're crossing our fingers for a good host that week. Look for us in the audience!

I spent the summer wasting

I don't know where summer went. Here are a few pics of what we have been up to lately

Memorial weekend we went to the NY Botanical Garden. It is basically just a forest, but when you are no longer accustom to seeing nature it is quite impressive.


Last week we visited the New Museum. Some of the exhibits were more exciting than others. The building itself was actually my favorite part.


There has been a parade on our street almost every weekend this summer . I think this is
the India parade. The Gay Pride parade was by far the most exciting. I can't believe I didn't take pictures of it...let's just say there was no shortage of shiny Speedos :) Thankfully, our apartment is at the back of the building so the parades don't intrude on my afternoon naps.


We spent a lot of summer weekend afternoons at Mamoun's Falafel. Delicious falafel pitas for just $2.50 and it is just a block away from Washington Square park.

The time was passed so pleasantly

Rad Paintings

Top Movies of 2010

This morning I was thinking about the films I have seen this year, and what has stood out. I thought 2009 was a pretty weak year for film, and so far I feel 2010 is shaping up a little better.

These are my favorite movies of the year, so far:

A Prophet

The best movie of the year so far. It is a foreign film, story about an Arab man in a French prison. It's basically a mob movie. Really incredible.

Restrepo

Fantastic war documentary. Reporters are embedded at a small Army outpost in Afghanistan. Compelling story; and no obnoxious narration or contextualization, it simply rolls the footage and lets the viewer come to their own thoughts.

Rounding out my list are Toy Story 3 and Inception, but I think everyone already knows what they are.

Back on the Wagon!

I realized today it has been months since my last post. Whoops. All I can say is that the weather this summer has been so disgusting, it saps my willpower to do this kind of stuff.

Luckily Fall is around the corner and I am very, very excited.

Life is good; two weeks ago we saw Arcade Fire in Madison Square Garden and it was amazing. Above is a blurry picture. They sold out the Garden two nights in a row with not cheap tickets. I had no idea they were so popular. As you can see, we had big baller seats.

Other than that, life as usual. We had a funny Saturday on the Upper West Side. We watched the movie Scott Pilgrim, which was surprisingly good, then we saw Marishka Hargitay, the woman on Law and Order. Then we ate dinner at a great Thai place.

Columbia

This last weekend we took the subway up to 116th street to see Columbia. The main campus was beautiful! You can tell a school has cash when all of their buildings look like Roman colosseums or colonial mansions and the the landscaping is basically a botanical garden. Columbia was the first college in NY state and the 5th in America.

I knew the largest cathedral in the US was somewhere nearby so after we were done touring the campus we set out to search for it. Just a few blocks away we found this giant church which we were sure must be it. The building took up an entire block!

Satisfied with our discovery we set out in search of a smoothie shop (NYC is getting incredibly hot and steamy) and ran into this...
The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, which is actually the largest cathedral in the US. It was massive. There was even a choir inside practicing.

Also, on our little adventure we stumbled across Grant's Tomb. We have lived here 7 months and it still shocks me how amazing this city is.

Step right up

Over Memorial Day weekend we went to Coney Island. This is my favorite picture from our trip...

Coney Island is one of those places that you only go once. We went to the restaurant that invented hot dogs.

We ate our hot dogs on the beach and let's just say there were not very many beach ready bodies around.


Then we walked by the freak show on our way to the subway and went home. It was enough Coney Island to last me a lifetime.

The Best Movie of 2010

This is Inception. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Maybe you've heard of him, he directed a little something called The Dark Knight, as well as The Prestige. This is his new movie, arriving this summer. Quite possibly the most awesome trailer ever.

Taxes in America at Historic Low

A new study on taxes was published recently which I found fascinating.

American tax rates in 2009 were the lowest they have been in almost fifty years.

"A family of four in the exact middle of the income spectrum will pay only 4.6 percent of its income in federal income taxes this (2009) year."

Click here for the link.

NY Mets

We went to a ballgame yesterday! We saw the Mets play the San Francisco Giants. It was awesome. We were worried the game would be cancelled, because it was supposed to rain yesterday, but it ended up 73 degrees and sunny.

We took the subway from Grand Central into Queens to the new stadium, Citi Field, which is incredibly nice. And despite being in very cheap seats, we had a fantastic view.





And to top it all off, the Mets won with a walk-off, bottom of the 11th inning home run by Henry Blanco! This is a picture of the team meeting him at home plate to celebrate after the game winning home run. The stadium was going wild!



- Posted from my iPad

iPad

I got an iPad for my 30th birthday. Initially, I was skeptical of the iPad, it seemed like a superfluous, gimmicky product which served no actual market. And after a week of owning one I can safely say.... that's pretty much true, but I still love it.

So far the iPad seems best equipped for basic media consumption. Email, internet browsing, watching movies, etc., are all very nice on the device. The screen quality is fantastic, the device is snappy and responsive, and even early in its life has some very cool apps.

Tribeca Film Festival

This weekend we went to the Trbeca Film Festival. We bought tickets to the festival's second place audience award winner, Snowman. I don't know what "audience" voted for this movie but I demand a recount. But it was fun going to the festival anyway.

30

Happy 30th Birthday Jim!!! You're all grown up.

Murray Hill

Maybe we don't have it so bad. New York Mag just published a report on the 50 most livable neighborhoods in NYC. Our Murray Hill was ranked #8 just behind my beloved Carrol Gardens. Above is the chart for Murray Hill. It's safe, affordable, and has lots of curry restaurants.

The article is a very interesting read. It just reinforces the fact that the trendiest neighborhoods are by far the most expensive making most of them not worth living in. But one can still dream.

Union Square

We are considering moving to Union Square when our lease is up in November. It has a beautiful park, lots of shopping and restaurants, and is only one express subway stop away from Grand Central. Every Saturday and Wednesday there is a farmers market. This is a view of the square from a store window across the street.

Today we went to Union Square for some flowers for our apartment....


and for some delicious pizza at Artichoke Basille's ,one of our favorite pizza places in the city.
Just a few short months ago we would have done anything to live anywhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn, now I find myself complaining because my neighborhood is not quite as convenient or fun as the one 20 blocks down the road. So is life :).

(I don't dislike our current neighborhood, it just lacks some of the amenities that I would prefer like better restaurants and a close, reasonable grocery store)

This Game looks Amazing

This is a trailer for Red Dead Redemption. It's a western-themed game developed by the same company that makes Grand Theft Auto. This will be AWESOME!

Probably won't die of Heart Attack

Six months ago the doctor told me I had to start running, otherwise I would eventually die of a heart attack, because I have/had(?) "pre-hypertension." Since moving to NYC, in addition to literally walking miles every single day, I also began running at the gym every time I lift weights.

I recently had my blood pressure tested again, and learned that it has decreased 10 points. Apparently, walking and running really do work. No early heart attack for me!!

Weekend in the Sun

What a fantastic weekend. On Friday night Melissa and I explored SoHo, and ate dinner on the patio of La Esquina Corner Deli, a fantastic Mexican restaurant. We then saw a movie at the Angelika Film Center and Cafe, a charming indie theater also in SoHo.

The weather on Sunday afternoon was great, so we enjoyed a picnic in Central Park, seen in the pics above. It was very crowded, and helicopters constantly buzzed overhead, but we found a nice area and layed down our blanket, soaking in the sun. There was a good mix of people at the park; a lot of babies having their pictures taken non-stop by doting parents, a few dogs, and at least one crazy(?) old man doing pushups for fifteen minutes. By the time we got home we were exhausted, so we decided to enjoy a cozy Sunday evening making garlic chicken pizza, watching some opening day baseball, and then a movie.

Also shown above is a picture of Melissa in front of Kashkaval, a Greek restaurant we visited with my dad a few weeks ago, in Hell's Kitchen. It happened to be literally right next door from the bike repair shop that fixed Melissa's cruiser. Her bike is now good as new. We are now eyeing a bike for me, so that we can cruise the city in style this summer! Now we just need a good basket for the front of Melissa's bike, and a tiny dog to ride in the basket (not really).

This Looks Rad

This is the trailer for the Scott Pilgrim movie. It is based on a wildly-popular graphic novel series.

The trailer is pretty self-explanatory. I mostly love that CGI allows surreal worlds to come alive on-screen. It's also cool that there are movies like this in which CGI isn't just an excuse for the director to have free-license to completely suck at their job, while lazily turning the entire film into CGI schlock, aka: Transformers.

Roadkill

I read a fascinating book last year called The Black Swan. It was written by a mathematics professor at the University of Massachusetts, and is about unintended consequences and predictability theory.

With the recent passage of the health care legislation, one storyline has been sadly overlooked, the complete and total elimination of Mitt Romney as a Presidential candidate in 2012.

With health care reform, Republicans found their wedge issue with which to power their 2010 midterm, and presumably, their 2012 campaigns. This makes sense politically, health care is a severely complicated issue. Last year I listened to a fascinating two hour debate between two prominent health care policy economists. One was liberal, the other conservative. The first hour of the debate was basically them agreeing with each other about how many problems the American health care system has. The sticking point was which interest groups would take a bath in any inevitable reform.

As Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney signed into law state-wide healthcare reform, which substantively is very, very similar to the law just passed by Congress. To quote one piece:

The federal bill and the Massachusetts bill have much in common. Both establish exchanges, both have an individual mandate (which Republicans detest), both provide significant subsidies to the poor to purchase health insurance. They differ in one significant respect, however- the Massachusetts bill does not contain a fraction of the cost controls contained in the federal bill. That means not only did Romney support the “entitlement” aspect of federal reform at a state level, he didn’t do enough to address rising costs for his state.

Poor Mittens.