sorabji at WSBJ.com |

Craigslist Favicon at Facebook?

Someone sent me a document through Facebook Messenger. I clicked to download the document and...

Carpe Diem, from Adam Kiyoshi Fujita, at the Welling Court Mural Project

Positive vibes have been hard to come by these days, as the coronavirus daily death toll in New...

Guitarist Tearing It Up On His Driveway During Corona Lockdown

During the Corona Lockdown I spotted this guitarist tearing it up on his driveway. Observers...

Remembering Aline, and the Net-Sex-Hungry Women I Met There. Golden Days of the Pre-Intertubes.

Aline was a connection to the French Minitel in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
I think I paid $11/month for it.
Or maybe it was by the minute.
I don’t know.
But Aline is where I met Marie.

From When Women Used To Send Me Their Poetry

Remembering how I used to exchange poems with strangers. This is from a college student, November 1994. mark, haven't seen you around in awhile :( i'm hoping that sometime you will send me another poem or a story or something, i...

WTH Happened Here?

...

E-Mail to Robert Helps, 1992

Dear Bob, Hello. How are you doing? I was thinking of you last night when I ordered a Cape Codder at Kennedy’s Restaurant & Bar on West 57th Street. They made it exceptionally strong, I think, which may have...

I’m a friend of Jesus: I will not suck my own penis.

I have no idea what this refers to. I found it in a mass of text files from the early 1990s....

E-Mail to Marie, 1993

I knew her through the Minitel, available in New York as “Aline”.

Washed Some Dishes at 3am

Farah Al Qasimi

I saw this on the side of a bus shelter and thought wtf kind of display advertisement is this?...

Beans are Coming Back

Dark

...

WhatWhat

Being careful, and being ridiculed by strangers for it. Fuck you. I cough on your face. But...

10.11 Miles

China Calling

Hmmm

Just Another Busy Wednesday Afternoon in Midtown

I struck up a brief conversation with the woman in this picture, seen standing in the middle of...

Goodbye Single-Use Plastic Bags, Hello Single-Use Latex and Vinyl Gloves

It’s not something I would have paid attention to before, so maybe these have always been...

Romano’s Astoria

Earthly Possessions

Latex Glove Turned Yellow

This latex glove turned yellow after I put it on. At first I thought my skin had turned yellow,...

Mad

Unmarked Columbarium Niches

Too cool that someone put their McDonald’s ring on top of their columbarium urn.

Buick Eight

No Chicken Dinner For Me. Boo-Hoo.

1:30am, Checking in on my Payphone

...

Did NYC Ever Have an “OO” Exchange Name?

Did an “OO” telephone exchange name ever exist in NYC? Just spotted this in the...

Rachel. New Calvary

Back of a Baby Doll’s Head Cracked Open by an Impromptu Map of South America

A Wall of Words in Brownsville Today

Blend

I Took This Picture. My Dad on the Left, His Twin Brother on the Right. Atlanta, 1998 (I Think?)

How my dad stayed so lean and limber after drinking and smoking into his Larry King suspenders...

You’ll Get 30 Years for Leaving a Food Delivery Menu Here…

Disk Cleanup

I spent much of the afternoon deleting gigabyte after gigabyte of redundant content, left over as a byproduct of several server moves, content management system switches, domain name changes, etc. It is tedious and thankless...

FUCK YO COUCH

Who Doesn’t Look Better in the Dark of Night?

...

My Exorcist Staircase

Some day, some way, I will fall down these stairs, and die. My head will turn around on its fatal...

Kind of a Discouraging Name for a Laundromat, or Any Place.

Favoritest Picture I Ever Got of the ESB

Snow Pix From a Bunch of Years Ago.

...

This is what Email from Eventbrite looks like to me

Oddest Idea for a Concert Event I Can Remember

There will, of course, be a classically-trained violin/piano duo performing Beatles covers at the...

Old House In Astoria

I never got a backstory, if there even was one, on this old house in Astoria, 24th Avenue ~45th...

Industry

Sometimes I find evidence of work performed, industry exerted, and mental ignition lit over...

Force of Nature

Here’s audio I made describing a woman I spotted while talking on a payphone yesterday. She paced back and forth outside a doughnut shop, drinking from a bottle of beer she carried in a black bag. She had a steely,...

Family Tree

The family was having a good old time when dad decided to bring things down to earth by reading the family tree. He had a late-life interest in genealogy, suddenly becoming best friends with distant cousins he had never...

Black Cadillac

Foothead

This post is called “FOOTHEAD” for a reason.

Indent

The red-inked bloodbath teacher in these scans, Ruth Allyn, is, as far as I know, the only person...

Calvary Panoramic

...

A Found Piano Playlist

I know I posted one of these before, the “Incantation”, but I’m not sure about the rest. Some of this is pedantic yet has its moments, while the “Song Without Words” is ace. Prelude, August 25,...

Frames Madness

Some said that frames, an innovation from the labs at NCSA Mosaic, were and abomination, akin to...

My Pictures, 2005.

This blast of photos represent most of what sits in the “My Pictures” folder in a PC...

Riding the Bus

I found the view through the back door of the Q32 bus through midtown to be strangely interesting, like peering out the window of a...

What the F’ing F’ Was This?

Waiting For That Gong To Sound

Stigma

Once in a while I jolt awake in the middle of the night, usually 2am range, remembering that hours...

“Yo, Pariah”: An Adolescent Triumph Revisited, At Last.

I was editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper. I was neither a great editor nor was I...

QUACK

Dark

THE UNBORN CHILD

I first read this stream-of-consciousness-seeming sign as “THE UNBORN CHILD CAUSES DAMAGE TO...

College Course Catalog, 1987

Thinking it might possibly be useful to somebody somewhere, and because I wanted to put my newish...

MI.1-8240 ARROW FENCE

This is the first new-to-me sighting of an old telephone exchange name phone number in over a...

Randomass Stuff Shows Up When I Clear My Desk

Found this 1970s-era Ektachrome slide today, in an envelope I never opened since receipt over 3...

(83) FOR-TRUTH: Strange Way to Format a Phone Number

I don’t have anything to say about the message on this billboard. What stood out to me is...

Some Pics From the Staten Island Ferry

Just trying to break in a camera I snagged cheap off eBay last week. It’s a Sony DSC-HX50,...

MTA Bus Arrival Time Tablet Screen

I spotted this in June, but have not seen another one since. At 61st Street and Grand Avenue in...

I Have a New Bridge to Cross

The view to Calvary from the new Kosciuszko bridge… It’s to die for. Sorry, not sorry,...

Record Everything

I am letting myself be recorded 24/7, or at least attempting continuous documentation. In this pursuit I finally did what I’d been curious about for years: I watched myself sleeping. I’ve have long wanted to explore...

5,000th Post? Bah.

I have no reason to congratulate myself or even give this matter consideration. But I sat down to write this post, with nothing in mind for its content, and noticed that this, should I finish and publish, would be the 5,000th...

When the Fancy Monkey Puppet Used to Patrol my Bookshelves

When My Bookshelves Still Mattered

Why is There an Apostrophe Here?

Things Fall Apart

More Smart City Fun

I quit writing about this, thinking I’d have no need to further document the shenanigan. I thought I had ceased its operation. But I’ll be revisiting the LinkNYC loudspeaker broadcasts sometime soon, along with other...

Farewell. Found This Photo From Forever Ago. Old Calvary.

From the Treo 700p Video Vault: Car Fire in Astoria, February 2007

Crap quality video from Feb 22 2007 of a car that burst into flames, with firefighter response, outside a bar in Astoria, Queens. It’s crap quality because it was recorded in the dark of night with a Treo 700p. All of us...