It is Friday. I forgot this means I should buy a new MetroCard, 7-day unlimited. I’m confused because tomorrow, Saturday, will be like a field trip. I’ll work in Brooklyn and not the usual Lower Manhattan location. I hope that works out, seems like logistics would be a puzzle.
No crazy dreams to speak of, but woke up with a good wood and all around feeling fine. Feeling serne enough that there should be nothing really to say.
Reading a book called “Visible Light,” a series of essays about 4 photographers. I only got it to read about one of them, the Angel, last name Rizzutto, can’t remember the first name but it might be Angelo. He is of interest to for being a sort of lightweight version of Vivian Maier. But in truth he came to my attention as the photographer who possibly snapped the first known pictures of Manhattan’s first outdoor phone booths, at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. They were installed in June, 1959; his photo is from July, 1959. If his are not the first ever photos of those booths they would certainly be among them.
I am expecting emails today from a reporter on East Hampton, where a couple of derelict payphones and possibly a phone booth have been left behind by PTS. I think one is at a park in Montauk, the other I don’t know. I had been ignoring media inquiries but in this case I actually have some knowledge and I’m just in a mood to be generous again. Giving out quotes and bytes to reporters earns me absolutely nothing in return, while the writers and reporters, of course, get paid. In the U.S. it is considered unethical for journalists’ sources to get paid. It’s not like that in other countries. A European network paid my cab fare (I walked to the interview) and some other hypothetical expense after a 2-hour interview that I never saw or heard anything about. The cab fare was over $100 and whatever the other expense was supposed to be for I think was for $75. They don’t take care of their interview subjects or sources like that in this country.
The price of strawberries had me fooled. A certain fruit/vegetable stand was selling 16oz containers for as little as $1. In the weeks since the price has increased to $4. I thought $1 was a little too cheap but maybe it was a planned novelty price to lure in suckers like me. Now the little fruit stand charges the same as the grocery stores.
I was going to try and get more disinformation out of CHatGPT but it’s already gotten boring. It should trouble someone that these bots are spitting out citations to news articles that were never written and concocting events and incidents that simply never occurred. I still have to laugh at the assertion that Calvary Cemetery’s chapel was bombed by the American Nazi Party, but then later the AI changed that “fact” and blamed the bombing on some other terrorist organization that may never have even existed.
If you’ve ever done any real research into anything it should trouble you to see AI pulling from the Jayson Blaire playbook, inventing incidents, sources, quotes, all with the gleeful confidence of a master bullshit artist. Oh what the hell maybe I’ll try again, to pollute the Intertubes with more disinformation from today’s master of the craft.
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Yeah, I tried. ChatGPT is definitely spitting out bullshit sources but I’m too apathetic to repeat them. Asked about the first outdoor phone booth in New York City it confidently asserts that it was installed at Greenwich and Dey in 1889, and this was reported on in a particular issue of the New York Times. I found that issue on the TimesMachine and find no mention of anything to do with phone booths. I asked ChatGPT for specific citation, as in what page/column would the article be found. ChatGPT had no idea, probably because no such article exists.
Similar misinformation comes from Bard, which claims the first outdoor booth in NYC appeared in 1905, and was located at 14th Street and 6th Avenue. No truth whatsoever to that claim. Can you imagine how much time will be wasted by researchers chasing after all these non-existent citations and hogwash assertions of historical fact?
