Maybe the trouble will be mine. I don’t know. I posted a story I knew would pique some interest at CityBridge. I just don’t know how they navigate their doublespeak. After my story posted a newer press release went out with slightly different wording, basically saying that there was a new “special app” that let you review, enroll, and change existing coverage. It does not seem to imply you can register anew, as it did before, and which is impossible. But there is no “special app”. It is just a whitelisted web browser which sends you to the same incorrigible New York State of Health website as a desktop PC user would get. Navigating that thing is enough of a beast on a computer. Imagine doing it through a tiny screen on a city sidewalk with no physical keyboard in the cold of winter. Good times, right?

I looked for who was accessing that particular story and all up and down it was CityBridge, Control Group, some legal firm, and NYC.gov’s DoITT. I don’t know how seriously that last group takes me but I don’t give them a hard time about much. I did a television appearance with someone from DoITT once, and they invited me, but that was a long time ago. At the last NYC Open Data powwow I went to one of the speakers kept bragging about how they had released, among other things, a dataset of trash can locations around New York. He mentioned this among 6 or 7 other marquee datasets that the agency was, for reasons I assume to be of its specificity and uniqueness, uniquely proud to have curated.

What I found funny about it was that I was the one who requested it. Yeah, big time data junkie here requesting latitude and longitude coordinates for every city-owned trash can in the five boroughs. I really was interested in mapping the coverage of those things, to see where the fewest of them are and if it corresponds to increases in street litter. But after I made the request I did not get a response for five years, by which time I’d moved on to ever more greatness.

…

It looks like I’ll make it tonight without booze. I was up at 6, after waking at 4am, meaning very little sleep last night but with little physical fatigue to show for it. I don’t know why this is but I guess it will catch up to me. I might take a sleeping pill tonight just so I can stay asleep. I heard the music last night, but since I was still visibly awake The Team did not erupt in its ritual joy of dancing dancing dancing.

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I asked the dude who lives upstairs about the post card I left for him downstairs. But it’s been long enough I guess he just does not remember. This was a post card I found in one of my storage boxes, intended for this person but misdelivered to me. It was nothing important, just an automatically generated message of some sort. But I thought it would be funny to him to find a post card from so long ago randomly sitting on top of the mailboxes in the lobby of this building. Alas, he did not seem to care or even take notice.

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Watching “Cat People” (1982). I saw this before but it’s been years. I never got why Nastassia Kinski was so universally considered gorgeous, but then I don’t understand how anyone could think Yoko Ono is hideous. I guess with Yoko it’s as much a matter of Beatles fans projecting their hatred for what they think she did to the band, or to John; and of course her soul-piercing voice. With Kinski I think it was just an 80s thing. She looks like a boy to me now, as always.

I don’t like gory shit but most of the blood and guts in this film has been suitably fake looking to where it was OK. Now, at 1:22:00, the dude is cutting up the leopard for what I guess is an autopsy. I already saw the cat breathing but that might just be one of those movie things where dead animals and people are almost always seen breathing.

In cutting up this leopard maybe there will be another more evil cat inside? I don’t remember how this ends or if I ever got to the finis. The fact that Oliver is cutting up the cat entirely by himself is a little suspect.

Oh, well… He cut up the leopard and that was a weird moment. Not quite explained unless it’s supernatural.

And also… that ending. Not the very ending back at the zoo but the scene before it. I don’t think I was allowed to watch this movie that far, or else I saw a sanitized version on broadcast TV. Because I’d remember that. Hello.

The main reason I sat through it all was the bank of I think 9 payphones seen at the opening, in the New Orleans Airport. Yay. That and, of course, the promise of more naked Kinski. Skinski.

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Going to get a sleeping pill and see how long it takes to sleep and stay asleep. Last night was ludicrous.