Daily Blague

When I woke up at five, this view didn't even exist. (For a view of the tall slab of brick that is Leighton House, scroll down a bit to the next image.) Looking down into the intersection of 87th Street and First Avenue, I could see the lights over a few doorways and the neon signs at Radio Shack, all very muted. Fogs like this don't roll in very often, so I'm crazy about them when they do - and glad that I'm not flying anywhere. Glad that no one else is flying, either, because when the air is this humid, the racket of reversed engines at LaGuardia would be intolerable, if there were any.

There was a spectacular fireworks display last night. We don't have them at this time of year very often, either, and I chuckled when I looked at the clock on the screen and saw that it was only seven-thirty - two hours later than the Fourth of July show begins. I didn't see the display, because I was too busy working on this site's templates. But I liked hearing the noise.

Just as I'll like hearing the noise of - oh, my God: the Marathon! The fog will probably burn off by then. It probably wouldn't get in the way of the race even now. The sound of the crowd lining First Avenue would strike you as very peculiar if you didn't know what was causing it. It's actually never the sound of a crowd, but rather than of a lot of individuals, the noise version of Thomas Tallis's "Forty-Part Motet" ("Spem in alium") sung with one voice per part. The cheering comes and goes as by now somewhat widely-spaced runners appear. (I believe that the corner of First Avenue and 86th Street is some nineteen miles into the run.) It starts sooner than you think it will, for the disabled contestants in their wheelchairs and handcarts, and it lasts much, much longer.

To avoid tangling with the Marathon crowd, I went to Agata & Valentina (79th and First) yesterday, and found that Kathleen was absolutely right: A & V is going to occupy the old bank on the other side of 79th Street, a building that most recently housed a merchant of objets de vertu. They'll use it as their "food court," of all things, a place to sell prepared dishes. This will presumably open up the space at the existing store, which has already undergone at least one major expansion. The new facility is set to open today, I wonder why.

When I had finished making the Daily Blague's front page look more or less like what it used to look like before I prematurely "refreshed" the site's templates, I turned to what I call the "permalink page" - what you see when you visit the site via a permalink - and it looked like hell. It was readable, but it had the look and feel of some member of the pajamahideen's desk, complete with the remains of yesterday's sandwich and last month's PC Gamer. For about an hour, I couldn't even grasp why it looked so bad. Lisa, of MovableType tech support, had already let me know that she was done for the weekend, so I knew that the panic button wouldn't work until Monday, and this was oddly tantamount to having pushed it. My thoughts began to gather coherently. I recalled a few things from my exchange of email with Lisa over the past two weeks, went back and located them, and in Tom Sawyer fashion I soon had the Individual Entry Archive where I wanted it to be. Far sooner that I'd dreamed, the permalink page had all the features that I'd undergone the upgrade in order to allow it to have.

Phew.

"It'll probably all fall down by lunch time" - Sybil Fawlty ("The Builders")