I’ve always enjoyed driving around at night when the streets are empty because of the combination of serenity and freedom. The other night I was the passenger on a trip from Bronxville to Piscataway, NJ with a detour to midtown Manhattan. This was the first time I’d ever been on the West Side Highway and I loved it. In fact, I enjoyed the entire trip: the NYC suburbs, the twisting on and off ramps, the West Side Highway, the industrial wasteland that is northern New Jersey and finally the Radisson sign by the interstate. I’m not sure I’ll ever be as happy to see a Radisson sign as I was then (I was inches away from passing out). For some reason, we were listening to AM sports talk radio but I didn’t mind it at all. This crazy guy called into the show and went off on this long tirade on the current state of sports. He moved effortlessly from fire and brimstone preacher to whining and literally crying about the depravity of it all. AM radio is great stuff – especially four in the morning.
All this talk of driving reminds me of all the great avenues in Istanbul. Here is a series of pictures of a drive starting from the Halic (the Golden Horn, that is old Constantinople) and ending on the Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridge, the second one spanning the Bosphorus. Both Istanbul and New York are true big cities. When I think of a true big city, it’s not just the population and the bustling downtown areas, it’s the sheer vastness of area. There’s something to be said when you drive through neighborhoods that seem like suburbs but are still in the bounds of the city. I love that. Unfortunately, though I’ve done a decent amount of traveling, I haven’t seen very many true big cities. Chicago, San Francisco and London are on my list. So is Asia.
I’m finally getting into Web 2.0. Yeah, I’ve always had facebook but the true gems of the Internet are the individual technologies like blogging and Wiki. I’ve recently joined a cool service called del.icio.us, which is a social bookmarking application. Basically, I bookmark websites through it and then I get to share it with other people. It’s been around for a while and I’ve found some great stuff trawling through random people’s profiles. If you have Firefox, there’s a convenient add-on that makes using it a cinch. Check out my del.icio.us links on the menu to the right. It’s a great selection so far: full episodes of Histeria, a wildly underrated cartoon from about least ten years ago; the TSA’s blog; a high school student pretending he got recruited by big time college football programs; and a true dominatrix story.
Bronxville?