Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

Have you seen this thing with Flaco the Owl who escaped from the Central Park zoo going on a year ago? If you haven't you obviously don't live in New York City. At least in Manhattan, this owl has become our crowdsourced pet.  When I just wrote "crowdsourced pet" it reminded me of an embarrassing error I made once while reading a Swedish article. The article, written in Swedish, talked about a guy who crammed, what I read to be "the crowd's cat" in his pocket. I thought it was an article about animal cruelty or something. I mean, he jammed a cat in his pocket?  But when I mentioned this whole cat shenanigan to a Swedish friend of mine, I found out the hard way (ie when she laughed uproariously at me) that it was an article about a guy embezzling tax dollars. IN MY DEFENSE, the Swedish word for tax is "skatt" and the word for cat is "katt" so if you put the word for "crowd" in front, you can very easily see how you'd go f...

  my nephew graduated from the Marines 80% of the fambo flew down to Parris Island to see the nephew graduate from Marines boot camp. It was touching really to see my nephew leave as very much a kid and come back a soldier. He got whipped into shape physically and also mentally... which I hope serves him well long term.  But that's not what this post is about. This post is about Family Day. The very very first thing my nephew wanted to do was go to the fancy commissary and buy... cologne. He wanted the brand of cologne that his drill sergeant recommended because his drill sergeant knows a lot about cologne. The drill sergeant is 26 years old and an expert in the olfactory arts. Believe me, we heard a lot about it. Let me tell you, these boys smelled good. Even from a distance. Moderation of smell is clearly not part of their training. It took me a while maybe to figure out that everything about their whole life is regimented and completely impersonal. You look at these guys an...