A Scouting Life

Steven Siegel has some amazing pics of NYC in the ’80s. Click through for more.

aquariumdrunkard:

Nico by the East River, 1971

Pretty cool, in that I ride my bicycle past that spot daily when I’m living in NYC.

scout:

bbbrad:

nedhepburn:

apoplecticskeptic:

brooklynmutt:

Esquire: Is the poster for the new season of Mad Men a desecration? Or just how we continue to reckon with 9/11?

Mad Men Season 5 Poster Controversy - Falling (Mad) Man, by Tom Junod

Yeah, and I think this is how we should count to 20 from now on :

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 10 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

People need to stop treating 9/11 like it’s some sort of religion. It was an incredibly sad event and an important one too but damn, people, quit fetishizing it. It’s a poster of a guy falling. Move on.

Fetishizing is the right word.

Uh, I’m pretty sure people are allowed to be offended by any image they deem reminiscent of 9/11 and I would hardly consider that fetishizing it. Honestly, the first thing I thought of when I saw this poster was that image, and I’m over it, but the connotations are still there.

Fetishizing it, really? I stood on the street and watched people jumping to their deaths on that day, and it pretty much looks exactly like that poster. Conscious or not, it is a pretty specific image and you’d have to be foolish not to notice the similarity. They certainly have a right to publish it, just as I have a right to be offended by it. Again, fetishizing it? Excuse me while I go use a picture of the ovens at Dachau to advertise prompt delivery of my piping hot pizza. Those damn holocaust survivors are just fetishizing it.

I gave my love a chicken that had no bone…

dlbrows:

CAKIES!

Three and a half years after the recipe was posted on Walkoff Walk (RIP) my girl and I finally got around to making Farthammer’s World Famous Cakies® last night. 

Un-be-lieve-able. I cannot recommend them enough.

Here is the recipe, as posted on WoW, that we followed as precisely as we could:

1 bag yellow cake mix

1 bag chocolate chips

1 stick butter

1 brick cream cheese

1 tsp vanilla

1 egg

Let butter and cheese get to room temp, then combine in a mixing bowl. Add egg and vanilla, combine. Then slowly add cake mix and chips. Combine thoroughly. Mixture will be thick, not unlike my johnson.

With a spoon, scoop onto a cookie sheet that has been sprayed with non-stick spray. Place in pre-heated oven at 375 degrees for 8-12 minutes.

Like I said earlier, if a few peaks on the cookies have started to brown, pull out immediately. That’s the longest you should cook them; just before they brown is ideal. Usually 9-10 minutes.

If the whole cookie turns brown in the oven, flush the cookies down the toilet and drink yourself into a stupor, because you have failed the cakie experiment.

The cakie will not look symmetrical or particularly attractive. The mix is too thick to get a perfectly round cookie. But they are mighty tasty.

Give them a try, bring them to the office and mess with everyone’s New Year’s diet. If you do, make sure you give Farthammer all the credit. His name should ring out in baking circles from coast to coast.

The truly brilliant part of this (aside from the cakes themselves) is that I shared the recipe with my Mother-in-law, forgetting to take out the line about the thick johnson.

newyorker:

The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people?

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

- In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about mass incarceration and criminal justice in America: http://nyr.kr/A75iOm

Photograph by Steve Liss.

Fascinating article, well worth reading.

wentdog:

bobbyfinger:

My fran Louis just sent me the best press release he’s ever received and now I’m completely incapable of life.

Tremendous 

The Wife and I were invited to this but unfortunately won’t be able to make it.

Looks like Jake made it home alright.