#NYC Turns 400

[xtruss]

Kayaking The Waters That Shaped New York City

As NYC Turns 400, One of the Best Ways of Understanding What Propelled the City's Astronomical Growth is by Paddling the Rivers that Built it.

— Eliot Stein | Wednesday 11 September 2024

Credit: Markley Boyer & Eric W Sanderson, from Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

Somewhere near Inwood Hill Park, home to the last native forests on the Island of Manhattan, the jackhammering racket of the city softened and an orchestra of crickets trilled in unison. I paddled closer to the water's edge, where a tangle of gnarled tree roots gripped boulders deposited during the last Ice Age. Just then, a great blue heron swooped low, landing on a small sandy cove before disappearing into the reeds towards the last remnant of the original salt marshes that once surrounded Manhattan.

"Finally," I thought, after spending the day kayaking around one of the most man-made places on the planet. "Maybe this is something the island's original residents might recognise."

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of New York City – or, more accurately, The Dutch Settlement of New Amsterdam that would grow to become one of the world's greatest cities. It's a complicated milestone, and for years officials have been grappling over what, if anything, they should do to observe the event.

According to historian Russell Shorto, the founding of New Amsterdam 400 years ago is when America began. Credit: Getty Images

As Russell Shorto, author of the best-selling book The Island at the Center of the World explained, this tiny Dutch settlement effectively birthed "The World's First Modern City" – a place powered by pluralism and capitalism under the promise that anyone, regardless of where they came from, could make something of themselves.

"If what made America great was its ingenious openness to different cultures, the small triangle of land at the southern tip of Manhattan island is the birthplace of that idea: this island city would become the first multiethnic, upwardly mobile society on America's shores, a prototype of the kind of society that would be duplicated throughout the country and around the world,'' he writes. More so than Boston, Plymouth Rock or Jamestown, "Manhattan Is Where America Began."

At the same time, the Dutch created this multiethnic society by removing Native people from their lands and importing enslaved Africans to build much of Lower Manhattan. "They brought tolerance and intolerance; capitalism and colonialism. We have to process both of these things in a nuanced way that acknowledges their achievements and failures," Shorto told the BBC.

"Manhattan Is Where America Began."

As a result, the few events honouring the city's quadricentennial have tried to carefully balance how this settlement forever shaped the nation with its dark legacies of land dispossession and slavery. "We're viewing this anniversary more as a commemoration as opposed to a celebration," said Sarah Cooney, the executive director of the Holland Society of New York, which is co-sponsoring a picnic on 14 September at Governors Island, where the Dutch Landed in 1624 before permanently settling in southern Manhattan soon after.

Those early immigrants never could have foreseen that the far-flung fur trading outpost they established would one day rise to become the most linguistically diverse city in history, nor that it would play host to a remarkable experiment that continues to this day: to see whether all the peoples of the world could live together in a single place.

New York City is believed to be the most linguistically diverse city to have ever existed. Credit: Getty Images

In many ways, Manhattan stands as the ultimate triumph of man over nature. But while it may be tempting to view it today less as an island and more as a cement reef covered by steel skyscrapers and manicured parks, the story of how this relatively small 23-square-mile enclave grew to become the economic capital of the world is directly attributable to a natural phenomenon many New Yorkers have long forgotten: its access to water.

"It's all about the water. The entire city is about the water," said Captain Jonathan Boulware, the president and CEO of the South Street Seaport Museum in Manhattan. "The growth of New York into the city we know today as a global capital, a cultural capital and a multicultural city, every single aspect of its identity is rooted in water and its connections to the rest of the world."

And so, as the city reflects on the many things that have made New York "New York" over the last 400 years, I lowered myself into a kayak and set out on a 30-mile circumnavigation of Manhattan in hopes of better understanding the one thing that made it all possible. It turns out that this nine-hour journey isn't just one of the most unique ways of seeing New York City, but a dramatic reminder of how Manhattan is rediscovering its relationship to the very rivers that shaped it.

A Front Door Into The New World

In 1609, Henry Hudson, an English explorer hired by the Dutch to find the fabled Northwest Passage to Asia, steered his ship from the churning waters of the Atlantic into an immense protected bay. He pushed 150 miles upstream on the mile-wide river that would one day bear his name, hoping it led to China. It didn't. But while Hudson had failed to find a faster route to the riches of the East, he stumbled on one of the world's largest natural harbours.

Sheltered from the sea's wrath by Staten Island and Long Island and stretching across a 770-mile network of navigable waterways extending into the continent's interior, this geographical gem wasn't just "a safe and convenient haven, wherein 1,000 ships may ride in safety", as the Dutch chronicler Adriaen van der Donck wrote in 1650, but a front door into the untapped resources of the New World.

The Dutch settled Manhattan because of its incredible access to (and protection from) the sea, and its network of navigable waterways into the interior. Credit: Getty Images

"The harbour of New York is like no other. It's a marvel. It's wide, it's so deep it rarely freezes and it serves as the nexus for two bodies of water [the Hudson and East rivers] that come together to transport goods," said Dr Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society.

This immense commercial potential is what attracted the Dutch to Manhattan from the start. At a time when the most efficient way to move cargo over long distances was by water, the Dutch Republic catapulted from relative obscurity to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world by controlling maritime trade. It's also what made Manhattan distinct from other early US settlements. Unlike the Puritans who founded Boston, the Quakers who came to Philadelphia and the Catholics who arrived in Maryland, the Dutch didn't settle Manhattan to worship in peace; they came to make money.

"The Dutch basically created a colony dedicated to capitalism. They didn't really care about religion; they were open to anybody involved in commerce," said Dr Gretchen Sorin, a historian and the director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York at Oneonta. "And so from the very beginning, New York has always been an incredibly diverse place." According to one document, by 1646 the island was home to some "400-500 men of different sects and nations" speaking about "18 different languages".

But as Shorto explained, "Manhattan was a cultural crossroads long before Europeans arrived there. It wasn't just the Lenape who used it to fish and exchange goods, but also the Shinnecock and other [Native Algonquin] peoples from the whole region who came to take advantage of the harbour and rivers."

Before the Dutch arrived, Mannahatta was an incredibly biodiverse island. Credit: Markley Boyer & Eric W Sanderson, from Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

After the Dutch purchased Mannahatta or "Island of Many Hills", as it was known, from the Lenape in 1626, more and more seafaring entrepreneurs poured into the harbour to navigate up these rivers, shipping beaver pelts, tobacco and grain from the continent's interior back to Europe. The Dutch eventually declared the settlement a free-trade zone in 1640, and by the time the British took it at cannon point in 1664 and renamed it after the Duke of York, this ambitious, polyglot little seaport had planted the seeds of religious tolerance, individualism and enterprise that would eventually spread across the nation.

Mannahatta: An Ecological Oasis

When the Dutch arrived on Mannahatta, it was a stunningly biodiverse place. In his book Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, landscape ecologist Eric W Sanderson details that in 1609 the island was home to 66 miles of rivers and streams, 233 species of birds, 32 types of reptiles and amphibians, 70 kinds of trees, 24 species of mammals and 55 different ecosystems – which is more, per acre, than Yosemite and Yellowstone or a typical coral reef or rainforest of the same size. "If Mannahatta existed today as it did then," he writes, "it would be the crowning glory of American national parks."

The British soon surpassed the Dutch as the greatest maritime empire on Earth and Manhattan became a nexus point for the flow of goods and people around the globe. Coopers, blacksmiths, sailmakers and shipbuilders began flooding to the island city, and by the 1770s, New York had become "the breadbasket of the Atlantic", shipping wheat and timber to Britain and importing rum, molasses and sugar – as well as enslaved people – from the Caribbean and Africa. The city would burn at the end of the American Revolution, but over the next few decades, it would become the largest place in the western hemisphere – all thanks to water.

In 1795, New York replaced Philadelphia as the country's main port, and as more ships from around the world flooded in and out of the harbour, the city expanded north from the southern tip of Manhattan at astonishing speed. Old Dutch farms and English estates were quickly carved up into smaller and smaller plots until DeWitt Clinton (arguably the greatest or worst New Yorker in history) spearheaded two ideas that would forever change Manhattan.

The first was to level the entire natural geography of the island to accommodate its growing seaport. In 1811, the city filled in its marshes, paved over its spring-fed ponds and levelled the oak and hemlock forests where wolves and bear once roamed, replacing it all with a massive 11,000-acre street grid that turned this "island of hills" into an island of rectangles.

By 1900, New York harbour was the busiest port in the world and Manhattan was the centre of a new global supply chain. Credit: Alamy

The second was the construction of a 363-mile-long ditch connecting the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, it not only paved the way for Manhattan to become an industrial juggernaut by giving it direct water access to the Midwest, but transformed the young nation by allowing the mass movement of goods, ideas and people across the country. The city was on its way to becoming the busiest port in the World and the centre of a new global supply chain connecting the continent with the rest of the globe. As Manhattan exploded with industry and became the place to do business, so many immigrants steamed into the harbour that according to Census records, by 1860 nearly 70% of adults in New York City were born outside the US.

Manhattan: America's Emporium

The book Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 reveals that by 1836, 62% of all imports to the US came through Manhattan, and on a single day that year, 921 boats on the East River waited to dock on South Street, while an another 320 waited on the Hudson.

"If you look at aerial photos of Manhattan [in the late 1800s and early 1900s], it's so completely ringed with piers that it looks like a porcupine," Boulware said. "These ships were coming from all over the world to load and unload cargo, and there were a lot of entrepreneurs trying to creatively turn $5 into $6 on those docks. It was an early example of the New York hustle. This is the DNA of the city and the port and water is the core of it."

As planes started replacing passenger liners and container ships were diverted to New Jersey in the 1950s, Manhattan's maritime industry began to collapse. Over the coming decades, piers and warehouses were abandoned, docks fell into decay and New York Harbor, which had been one of the most diverse and dynamic environments on the planet when the Dutch showed up, became a de facto dump.

But in the last decade, billions of dollars have been pumped into cleaning up the city's waterways, a string of ambitious projects have transformed Manhattan's rusting piers into landscaped green spaces and the city's once-derelict waterfront has become a model of urban renewal. As a result, more than four centuries after Hudson's crew reported that waves of Lenape came out to greet their ship in "great canoes" as they approached the island, Manhattan is returning to its water-bound roots, and quickly emerging as one of the US's most unique paddling destinations.

Many boathouses now offer free kayaking all over New York City. Credit: Alamy

"There's no place like it in the country," said Suzy Basu, managing partner of Manhattan Kayak Co, which offers hourly rentals, classes and guided tours around the city – including a 30-mile lap of Manhattan. "So many people here don't even realise Manhattan is an island, but when you paddle around this magnificent, man-made mountain range of towers shooting into the sky, it changes your whole perspective of the city. You'll see."

Kayaking Manhattan

Pushing out of Pier 84 and into the Hudson's swift tidal flow, it quickly became clear that the key to navigating Manhattan's waterways on your own power is something the island's Indigenous residents understood long ago: it's all about the current.

The original Algonquin name for the Hudson River was Mahicantuck or "river that flows two ways". That's because, like the East River that rings Manhattan's opposite end (which isn't actually a river but a tidal strait), its current changes direction every few hours as it flows in and out of the ocean. Therefore, our floating parade of 14 kayakers and four stand up paddleboarders would travel counterclockwise around the island in a perfectly timed route designed to take advantage of the rivers' shifting currents.

Accompanying us were three guides armed with two-way radios whose job was to safely navigate us through the rush of ferries, barges and sightseeing cruises – one of whom was Eric Stiller, Manhattan Kayak Co's 64-year-old founder, who estimates he's circumnavigated the island 80 to 100 times. He explained that back in the 1980s, there was no access to the water for paddlers anywhere, so he used to jump fences and launch his foldable kayak in the Hudson from rotting piers. As word of his exploits spread, people started paying him to lead them out into the rivers where no one else dared go.

"My first paying customer was [American singer] David Lee Roth, followed soon after by John F Kennedy Jr," he said, as we paddled towards the glimmering pinnacles of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings in the distance. "We used to wheel kayaks out [in the Meatpacking District], jump the fence and paddle out to Ellis Island. That's how this all started."

Fast-forward to today and the New York City Water Trail connects paddlers with 160 square miles of navigable waterways, dozens of launch sites dot the city and many of Manhattan's newly opened boathouses now offer free kayaking.

As the current carried us south along the 550-acre Hudson River Park that runs along Manhattan's western shore, the island's recent waterfront revival unfolded in front of us. Since first opening in 1998, the park has been slowly transforming many of the collapsing piers that once propelled the city's growth into creative urban oases – all while paying homage to Manhattan's maritime past and incorporating native ecosystems that thrived here 400 years ago.

We soon paddled past Little Island, a $260m "floating park" rising like a bouquet of tulip-shaped concrete columns from the Hudson that opened in 2021. Built atop the former Cunard Line dock that shipped people and goods between Manhattan and the British Empire (and next to the pier where the survivors from the Titanic landed in 1912), it's home to 350 species of flowers, trees and shrubs that Mannahatta's early residents would recognise today.

Moments later, we drifted past Gansevoort Peninsula, where novelist Herman Melville spent years working as a customs inspector at the wharf after writing Moby Dick. Opened in 2023, the park features a restored marsh, native grasses and a 1,200-ton sand beach designed to mirror those that lined the island's western shore when the Dutch arrived.

The $260m Little Island park now rises from the nubs of Manhattan's commercial piers. Credit: Getty Images

Tribeca's 2.5-acre "ecologically themed" Pier 26 then came into view, where a newly planted woodland forest, coastal grassland and maritime scrub is designed to mimic the river's original coastal habitat. A brand-new "Estuarium" opened in January 2024 featuring a playground inspired by fish species that thrived in the Hudson before European colonisation, and as I looked to my left, I spotted children climbing into the gills of a colossal Atlantic sturgeon.

Work is underway on the other side of Manhattan, too, where the East Midtown Waterfront project is part of a grand vision to close the loop and provide New Yorkers with continuous waterfront open space around Manhattan once it's completed in 2026.

As we approached the southern tip of Manhattan where the Dutch settled, a sudden "Hold!" command from Stiller thrust me back into the present. Four centuries later, these waters remain Manhattan's busiest maritime throughfare. With boats and barges rumbling all around us, Stiller explained that once he gave the signal, we had exactly 10 minutes to round the island's southern point before the next Staten Island ferry stormed by.

I glanced over at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island on my right, One World Trade Center on my left and snapped a quick picture with my phone. Then, one of our guides, Tommy Montgomery said, "You're going to want to secure that now before we get to Hell Gate."

"Before we get to what?" I asked.

But before he could reply, Stiller shouted, "Now, now, now!"

Top: Paddlers pass under 21 bridges when circumnavigating Manhattan, including the Brooklyn Bridge. Credit: Eliot Stein Bottom: One thousand ships every year used to crash at Hell Gate, and when officials blew up its bedrock in 1885, the explosion was heard 50 miles away. Credit: Alamy

Paddling as hard as we could, our crew quickly crossed the channel, caught the East River's flood tide and shot north on an 11-knot (12.5 mph) highway past the last 19th-Century cargo sailing ship still docked at the historic South Street Seaport and under the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges. At one point, I noticed we were zipping past a kid biking along the East River Greenway. As we neared the northern tip of Roosevelt Island, Montgomery looked back at me.

"Okay, this" he said, "this is Hell Gate. Stay to the left and paddle hard."

Coined by the Dutch (Helle Gadt) and known as the most notorious stretch of the city's complex waterways, Hell Gate is the swirling, churning, narrow tidal strait where the Harlem and East rivers meet. It's also the final resting place of hundreds of ships. But because successfully traversing it could save merchants sailing from New York Harbor to New England days of travel, so many sailors tried to run its gauntlet that in the 1850s, an estimated 1,000 ships ran aground here every year. In 1885, at the height of Manhattan's maritime might, officials determined that subduing this treacherous passageway was so crucial to the nation's economy that the US Army Corps of Engineers blew up its bedrock with 300,000 lbs of explosives in the largest planned detonation before the atomic bomb.

Today, the confluence remains chaotic and unpredictable – akin to "paddling through a whirlpool", as Stiller later told me – but with the currents working in our favour, we were soon beached at Randall's Island.

One of the consequences planners likely didn't consider when they paved over Manhattan's natural topography is that there are virtually no places people can feasibly stop when kayaking around it – even for a bathroom break. A rocky beach on Randall's Island is one of the few exceptions. So as the other paddlers downed their energy bars and I tucked into my Bodega Sandwich, I took a moment to meet them.

Of the group's 17 other paddlers, 11 were women and only one other person had never completed "the circ". There was Nick Avrutin, who said he spends so much time on the water with Manhattan Kayak Co that he now stores his kayak at the boathouse; Stacey Hull, who was attempting her first circ on a stand up paddleboard after many in a kayak; and Giandomenica Becchio, who travels from her home in Turin, Italy, to New York every summer to lap the island.

"When you get on the water, it really gives you a different perspective of what the city is," said Eva Rivlin, looking down at a crab that had washed up on the beach. "Our shorelines are these incredible, diverse ecosystems, and to see it from this perspective, you really understand not only the scale of the city but how it all fits together."

As we chatted, a family waded into the water nearby. Officials maintain that after decades of neglect and abuse (and a more-than $45bn restoration effort), the city's waterways are now cleaner and healthier than they've been since the Civil War. In fact, many experts agree that it's generally safe to swim in the Hudson, and I even spotted a swimmer tearing through the river later that day. Rivlin pointed across the river to one of the 700 outfalls that dump billions of gallons of sewage into the city's waterways each year, but she also pointed towards a rusting pier reclaimed by the Billion Oyster Project, whose ambitious goal is to restore the 220,000 acres of oyster reefs that sustained the Lenape and nourished the Dutch.

"People still have this perception that the water is dirty and not safe, and it's still dirty, but it's incredible the developments in the last 15-20 years that have changed it by leaps and bounds," Rivlin said.

A 1,000-Year-Old Rock in Inwood Hill Park marks the site where the Dutch allegedly purchased Manhattan. Credit: Alamy

Two hours and 13 bridges later, we had finally paddled our way out of the Harlem River's modern industrial sprawl and reached the island's northern tip at Inwood Hill Park, where Mannahatta's primordial past still defies Manhattan's paved presence. It's perhaps fitting that here, just a few steps from a series of caves used by the island's Native inhabitants for millennia, a 1,000-year-old rock marks the site where the Lenape purportedly sold the island to the Dutch four centuries ago.

Moments after I watched the heron vanish into the reeds, the trilling of crickets was swept aside by the whooshing traffic and whirring helicopters of the city. My fleeting glimpse of Mannahatta was gone – or so I thought.

As we waited for the Hudson's current to shift so it could carry us south towards the soaring skyscrapers of Midtown, it occurred to me that for as much as this island had changed in the last 400 years, one part of its natural landscape remained the same – and it had been guiding me around Manhattan all day.

[myloveforhergoeson]

ash's june 2024 reading round up

find all the books and fics i read this month under the cut with a link to the synopsis and my reviews/ratings attached :)

this is just for fun! i'm not a professional, i just like to read <3

booklist:!

Book Lovers by Emily Henry (18+!)

• big emily henry fan here, i've read most of her other books and i just picked up her new one. this one, in comparison to the other ones i've read, was in my opinion, just kind of middle ground. it wasn't as amazing as i was expecting and it wasn't bad, i just don't think this was the book for me. about a literary agent, nora, and her rival - a brooding editor for a major company she works with, charlie - both being displaced from their big city life and finding themselves in the same small town for the summer. they keep bumping into one another in sunshine falls after a less than fortuitous business meeting in NYC a few years ago and one thing leads to another. turns out charlie isn't actually as bad as she had thought! perhaps i'm just unread in the small town romance genre, but again, this one wasn't really for me. i didn't feel like charlie and nora really had all that much chemistry. i was actually more interested in their lives separate from each other than how they meshed together oddly enough. a lot of henry's books center around family - more specifically familial grief after the death of a parent - and this book was no exception. the detailed descriptions of nora's past, dealing with the death of her mother and needing to step up to take care of her younger sister, hit really close to home for me as an older sister. learning about the course of her life come to a grinding halt and the two of them learning to pick up the pieces together was beautifully done and had major implications for the turning point of charlie and nora's story. nora and libby were the highlight of this book for me - i loved every single scene between them and i almost wish it was just about these two. charlie on the other hand, is a local of this small town and has a sordid past with many of the individuals there. i didn't like his character all that much personally, he felt kind of flat in general to me, but i did think his interactions with the other local characters was very interesting and i liked that nora had a bit of a puzzle to put together as she stayed in sunshine falls. though she accidentally went out with his cousin - yikes! overall, two very detailed stories coming together to form one that i almost wish were two separate books. romance plot in this one didn't really do it for me and that's okay! i still had a good time reading it :)

i'd recommend beach read or happy place by the same author in place of this one.

• rating 3/5 times i wondered why anyone would want to live in a small town over the city...

2. My Roommate is a Vampire by Jenna Levine (18+)

• yeah i know. guys i know. but what can i say. i'm a simple girl with simple taste and i love vampires. this book wasn't groundbreaking of course but it was soooo fucking funny. loved very moment of it! like what do you mean our fmc cassie just moves in with a random guy who has a wonderful apartment and he's super hot and sexy and he talks and dresses like he's from a different time and he tells you there's a part of your apartment you can never go and he sleeps all day and is out all night and she's just okay with it 😭 girl what if he killed you 😭 anyway. mmc fredrick j. fitzwilliam they can never make me hate you. being alive for almost 400 years is tough, especially when you need someone to teach you the modern ways of life after being asleep for the last century! every time the two of them went everywhere and did something i was like rolling in my seat with laughter. trying to pay for coffee at a hipster coffee shop where the drink names don't actually tell you what's inside? where the sizes are named after planetary phenomenons? where he pulls out a velvet sack of coins and tries to pay with dabloons? god guys it was so funny i can't even begin to put my thoughts of this down on paper. they go to a party so he studies pop culture all night and memorizes taylor swift's entire Wikipedia page???? normally i hate t swift being brought up randomly in modern romance novels (happens way too much IMO) but i'm willing to look past it this time. WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHE STOPPED A KIDNAPPING USING TIKTOK LIKE???? say what you will about my sense of humor but never in a million years did i guess how this book was ending. fucking hilarious and so entertaining and cassie and fredrick are very cute together. honestly the romance was like b plot for me i just thought he was too silly and wanted to know all about what weird shit fredrick was doing that day. again, not the most enlightening or literary force of nature i've ever read but i did have a very very good time. boo me if you want but i'm right <3

•rating: 4/5 times i wished cassie and fredrick wrote more notes to each other

fic list:

i read a lot i'll try to get them all im so sorry if i missed any but i've read, rb'd, and loved them all!!!

assorted works of @partiallypearl:

just another wide-eyed girl, who's desperately in love with you

keep going to the sunrise (put the car in cruise control)

'cause i can't turn to you when it all falls apart

when you love someone that's all you can do

cargan blurb

running to your heart

no notes literally every single one of these was perfect and i'm so lucky to have the privilege of reading them :) james and elisa have been on my mind so much lately, but i also really loved your other works with rhuben and logan and macie. when you love someone that's all you can do is a work of art i wish i could frame it and put it in a museum <3

• assorted works of @icegirl2772

Take a Shot in the Dark

Better than Neil (a GIFT?? for me???)

We Do (But Friends Don't)

my friend... i love your writing so much!! the new chapter if take a shot in the dark is just wonderful, can't wait to reread and leave my comment hehe. better than neil (along with being such a surprise!!) had so much love and care put into it, each section bouncing off of one another was just genius and reading it made me feel so giddy. james and kaelyn are like handmade to be perfect for each other and that story did so well of highlighting that. and we do (but friends don't) !! don't even have words. i love kaelyn and james so much and this fic makes it so clear how they care for each other and want to be cautious of that while still having fun together :) so much raw trust and honesty on display, it's just an incredible (and spicy!) read :) <3

• assorted works of @ceruleanmusings:

• .3

.4

.5

Mason - Band Dynamics

Big Time Confession

.6

.7

Big Time Double Date

desolation pt 1

desolation pt 2

endearment

omg i don't even have words for this incredible selection of works from this month. all of the mickames blurbs were so adorable, confession literally brought me to tears, double date was just hilarious, and endearment made me smile!!! i love how those all balanced out with the emotion and power tucked into both parts of desolation; the switch up really shows how hard relationships can be, even if they seem easy!, and how two people try and get past even the toughest of times together. loved the openness of difficult conversation and how james and mickey managed that together. it felt so true to real life and literally had my stomach wrenching at points. i was so worried for them, and i'm so happy they're working it out! <3 and i always love reading more about the mason band! i love them!! :))

• assorted works of @selangkir

• the girl time rush au

• jucy (no, not that one) story

ohhh my god again and again and again i read girl time rush. literally like twice a month but this month especially i wanted to highlight it bc it served as inspiration for my own little story hehe <3 stories from the perspective of james just kill me i love him so much and i feel like all three parts of girl time rush encapsulate that perfectly. from dealing with a job he didn't really want, to working behind the scenes, to a tumultuous situationship(? kind of. i don't really know what that word means but it feels appropriate) with dak zevon. god every time i read it i love it even more. and the jucy story... such a wonderful switch up of the real story and how it would affect the characters if things went differently! it was so cute, i loved it so much. can't wait to add it to my reread list <3333

• @cant-get-enough-btr-forever 's story Big Time Battle of the Bands

ahh!! i loved this story so much; the only bad thing was having to wait for the chapters to upload and not getting to read it all at once! i know i said this over and over but it truly read like a big time rush episode - you did such a wonderful job of taking the wackiness from the real show and molding it into something if your own. the battle of the bands was such a fun idea and i loved all of the girls and how they mirrored btr! jessica my beloved... it had it all: action, romance, comedy, i couldn't ask for more!!!!

• assorted works of @raging-violets:

• Around the World and Back

such a wonderful story (inspired by a wonderful song!) that put forth the trouble with touring, what happens when it comes to an end, and the toughness of a goodbye. kendall and riley have such a wonderful dynamic that was put on full display with this one! their promise to keep talking when they can (because talking is what they do best!!) was so adorable and i love that they managed to get through their tough time together :)

i believe that's everything but if i missed something IM SO SORRY!

<3333

[itshype]

A comedy version of Abigail where the 400-year-old 12-year-old (yes i googled the year NYC was founded as the earliest she could have been turned) didn't know she was susceptible to modern poisons and wakes up after being kidnapped from her house (yes she looks 12 but she’s looked that way since before the invention of the piano. She doesn’t need to live with her dad.) And the vampire mob enforcer is just like "....is this...a prank?" Who tf would kidnap Kristoff Lazar's child even if they had no idea who she was.

Joey: We won't hurt you, we promise. Little Ballerina Child waking up chained to a bed: Say sike right now.

[dietraumerei]

Weekly Writing and Reading Update

Hello, I love having my little house in the woods and I love where I live and I even love yardwork but good lord I am tired of fighting weeds. Next year should be better as I put in groundcover and the like, but until then...well, to be fair, today's hardest part was digging up all the EXTREMELY HEAVY roofing tiles someone just left under the mulch. So that's nice to not have in the ground?

Now is the time to sit around in my dressing gown and drink gatorade and watch the cats snooze, at least.

Oh, fyi, I turned my inbox off, since lately I'm only getting spammed with scams, and I have little patience for it. It was rare to get an actual inbox message, but it kind of sucks that I have to shut it down.

Writing

The eye beholds the heart's desire; done and done!! I loved writing this, it was very fun, the end.

Whumptober: I am slowly getting stuff done, but it definitely won't be the bonanza previous years have been -- or, if it is, it won't all get posted in October, or maybe even in 2024, lol. (It is not lost on me that so much of my GO writing is about finding and making a safe place, a physical home, and now that I have one it kinda cuts into my writing time :) )

Reading

I am making (slow) progress with The Master of the Senate, which is obviously brilliantly written but also I can only take so much senatorial power brokering. Lyndon has just exhibited his first redeeming trait, though, so that's cool. I have, though, finished:

Weyward: This is a very solid thriller. Not earthshattering, not bad, just a nice, solid book. The lesbianism is annoyingly subtle, though. (As a whole, it could have been a great book, but I'll settle for solidly good and interesting happily.)

Pond: This, on the other hand, is wild and brilliant, a narrative about life and a little house by a pond and making the mundane worth remarking on. It was wonderful to read outside in the evenings, in particular; I already cannot wait to re-read it.

City of Dreams: a LONG history of immigration in NYC; very good, excellent survey of 400 years which is a pretty thankless task, gave me some Feelings without being tooooo rah-rah America.

[zponds]

The Genie Team - Season 9 - “The Tragedy of Penn Central” (part four)

Even though Penn Central was formed on February 1st, 1968, problems already began as rivalries from before boiled into Penn Central, as management from both the NYC and PRR barked at each other like wolves over how to run the railroad… the NYC management wanted to modernize and innovate the network and the PRR management wanted to do things the old way. And this bickering boiled down to the employees, and it got so bad that the green team (NYCS) and the red team (PRR) bickered over what to call a caboose. And even before New Haven was added, Penn Central began loosing more money… and things only got much worse once New Haven was incorporated into the merger on January 1st, 1969, and with that, New Haven’s financial crisis boiled into Penn Central. Another major bloodline for the railroads was transportation of food from farms, but a Penn Central train full of potatoes arrived at its destination extremely late and the potatoes were spoiled and rotten, and that lead to farmers turning to trucks, which in turn, worsened the railroads’ financial maelstrom. Now that train arrived extremely late because the railroad lines were deteriorating, which was caused by the railroads to save money as they were losing it due to the public’s ever increasing betrayal. And that negligence of maintaining track conditions continued on, creating expensive derailments, which lead to even more lost money. If that wasn’t enough, the ex-NYC and ex-PRR management groups continued to bark at each other like wolves over how to run the railroad, and it got so bad that a lot of the ex-NYC people left and went job-hunting, and NYC President Alfred E. Perlman was ousted when PRR President Stuart Saunders gave into the pressure of the Pennsy’s bitter old men like a wimp. And on top of that, Saunders gave into EVERYTHING that unions wanted, which was another factor that made everything much worse. And if all that wasn’t enough, Penn Central was also losing money due to unprofitable passenger traffic, now Penn Central was desperate to shut those down in order to avoid losing money, but sadly, the evil ICC refused to allow Penn Central to shut down passenger services, and the evil ICC forced Penn Central to keep those unprofitable passenger services active… and with all this combined, Penn Central was losing a million dollars EVERY SINGLE DAY. And it all finally came to ahead on June 21st, 1970… Penn Central gave up on its initial struggle and declared bankruptcy of nearly 400 million dollars. At the time, this was the largest bankruptcy in history, and it was a major un-ignorable wake up call that the railroad networks in the Northeastern USA were rapidly deteriorating, and if not dealt with quickly enough, would have disastrous economic consequences. So on May 1st, 1971, Amtrak was officially founded and took control of all passenger services, especially intercity passenger services. That did help in getting passenger services off Penn Central’s back, but their problems remained and even worsened as the 1970s slowly carried on. By 1974, Penn Central made and released a 30-minute video showing the rapidly deteriorating condition of their networks as they were desperate for federal funding to improve their lines and services. Things didn’t actually begin to improve until April 1st, 1976, when Conrail was formed and took over much of the Northeastern rail network, and slowly, Conrail made a profit and brought the Northeastern rail system back into profitability and operational condition… mostly thanks to the Staggers Act of 1980, which no longer made the evil ICC a severe hindrance. But the tragedy of Penn Central left its impact on railroading history as the New York Central System and Pennsylvania Railroad, the two most famous railroads in the Northeastern USA, became no more and are nothing more than distant memories. And Penn Central’s disastrous bankruptcy officially and sadly declared the end of the golden age of American railroading.

[spinner-of-stories]

(CW: talking about multiple deaths by electrocution)

The second photo and possibly the third are from the Great Blizzard of 1888—also called The Great White Hurricane, which should give you an idea of how bad it was. The second photo specifically is of a street in New York City. A lot of the power lines in that picture would have broken in the storm; one downed power line in NYC actually electrocuted a horse to death.

The storm killed 400 people, dumped 10 to 58 inches of snow from New Jersey to Massachusetts, caused $25 million ($850 million today) in damages from fire alone, and shut down the New York Stock Exchange for two full days; the next time the NYSE closed for multiple days due to the weather was when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. Between the damage to the power lines and their poles, and electrical companies deciding to shut down service to prevent even more problems, pretty much all of NYC had lost power by the end of the first day of the storm.

Even before the storm, NYC had already passed a law requiring the burial of electrical cables, which the corporations that were affected were opposing at every turn because it was so much cheaper and easier to just string their cables between poles than to bury them underground. One company even threatened to leave the city! (Those cables in the pictures aren’t just carrying electricity, by the way; there are also lines for the telegraph and telephone, fire and police alarms, and private security systems, among other things, including lines that were no longer even in use but had never been removed.)

Even after the storm and the resulting redoubling of the city’s efforts, corporate opposition to burying the lines continued all the way up to October of 1889, when two separate people working on electrical cables died by electrocution within days of each other. The second death, that of Western Union employee John Feeks (I’ve also seen it spelled as Feeke or even Leeke), happened on a crowded street and was witnessed by a massive crowd of people. The public outcry following Feeks’ death was a major part in finally forcing the companies to comply with the law.

And that’s why complicated masses of electrical wiring like the ones pictured above are now a thing of the past!

Some sources:

Blizzard! The Storm That Changed America, by Jim Murphy.

This article, with excerpts from a contemporary newspaper about John Feeks’ death.

Encyclopedia Britannica:

Virtual New York City: The Blizzard of 1888/Building the Invisible City (make sure you also read the page before the one I’m linking to)

Stupid is timeless.

[bonfire-at-the-crossroads]

Godd save us from the “Experts”

Went to an auction in the North - Irvinestown, a couple weeks ago. Fairly ordinary, a few nice things, and this frame hanging on the living room wall. I glanced at it, but kept coming back to it as the auction droned on. Pulled it off, turned it over - was beguiled by the hand-forged iron hanger, and the inscribed name of one F W Barton.

It was me and an invisible online bidder - I chased hard, and won.

I believe it to be an original 17th century carved and gilded auricular frame from Florence.

Yes, I know there have been copies made. But this is OLD. the hanger is old, the lettering is old, the carving is great, the gilding is heavy and lovely - and it doesn’t look like a 19th century copy to me. The man whose house I was in and whose stuff was being auctioned, had also written his name on verso. He dated it when he acquired it, so it’s been in that house since December 1952.

I started researching the Barton family, and found my guy. The original Barton made a fortune importing Bordeaux wines in the late 1600’s - he bought vast amounts of land, built several big important estates - one of which was a few miles from Irvinstown. (Now demolished)

The place, the names, the dates, and even a particular Barton who lived in Florence in the mid 1700’s - everything points to this being an original work.

But

I sent photos and my research to the “expert” at Adam’s. Without actually examining it, he has responded “19th century copy - probably with a connection to F W BURTON “ - an artist who did a lot of pre-raphealite paintings and used baroque frames. “ worth between €200-400.”

Without consideration of all the similar-looking gilded auricular frames in museums across the world? Without examining the piece in your own hands? I “thanked him” - and remarked that “I am left wondering why anyone would trouble to carve such a thing in the mid 19th century - when the taste in decorative ornament would have followed along the lines of French or English frames of the period?” A polite fuck you….

I’ve sent the photos to Lowy’s in NYC, and to Bassenge Galleries in Berlin. Here’s hoping to find somebody with eyes and a curious mind…

[tvguidancecounselor]

TV Guidance Counselor Episode 623: Allan Arkush

December 7-13, 1985

  This week Ken welcomes writer, producer, professor, director and all around good guy Allan Arkush to the show.

  Ken and Allan discuss Allan's cool office, Allan's record collection, Roger Corman, Emmy Nominations, directing or directing and producing over 400 episodes of TV, the path from 70s exploitation to 80s mainstream TV, having a high batting average of sold TV pilots. Fame, Summer pilot, Rock N Roll High School, telling stories through music, how popular Fame was in Israel, residuals, 80s NYC, directing videos for Elvis Costello, Bette Midler and Fleetwood Mac, the ones you turn down, why 1985 was a huge TV year for Allan, St. Elsewhere, Moonlighting, being able to be a style chameleon, being a cinema fan, having Scorsese teach you film, growing up in NJ, making whatever movie you want as long as it's the movie Roger wants, how hard it is to make good TV, coverage and lighting, how execs are not funny or creative, how bad studio notes are, King Kong, Micky Mouse Club, serialized stories, loving the theme songs from Westerns, Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Loan Ranger, Circus Boy, Abby Singer, The Twilight Zone, Soupy Sales, using rock music in movies, Get Crazy, Zacherly introducing the Grateful Dead at the Filmore East, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners bump, being a nerd, how some things don't hold up, The Dick Van Dyke Show, working with Ron Howard, Doris Day movies, Family Affair, Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, the importance of empathy, the transitional time of the 70s and 80s, East Side West Side, The Bronx Zoo, Hill St. Blues, the importance of casting, working for Bruce Paltrow, Crossing Jordan, ER, police procedurals, the time Ken ruined a shot in the pilot of Crossing Jordan, having to rush home and watch Saturday Night Live, SCTV, Catherine O'Hara's total character commitment, film noir, the zeitgeist of relationships between men and women, the dancing baby on Ally McBeal, Heroes, Duck Soup, The Shining, Lemony Snicket, showing The TAMI Show to young people, and how the future is female.

Check out this episode!

[steamishot]

mindset shift

i've been working to shift my mindset to live in NYC as if i'm not moving away soon. it's really hard to be present when i have one foot out of the door. my old expectation was "we're going to move back in X months", which resulted in a lot of disappointment and internal struggles. i'm trying to turn this into "we're going to be here for another year and anything less than that is a treat". instead of focusing on when we're gonna be in LA or our next travel plans out of the city, we've been doing a lot of activities locally. i even signed myself up for a 6 week pottery class at NY togei that starts end of february. the class costs $495 and is a huge splurge, considering i've never paid for any "fun" multi-week classes my whole life. this is really a dream come true for me. that means i have to sit my ass down and not go anywhere! if this class goes well, i might even consider signing up for the intermediate class.

on top of pottery class, i also tried to sign up for an acrylic painting class. unfortunately, the class is very small (8 people) and it's competitive to get into. i was #26 on the waitlist. the idea of going out into a class with a consistent schedule (or like, having an obligation outside of the apartment that isn't a social plan) is very appealing to me. i'll continue to try to get into acrylic painting.

yoga: matt and i are doing hot yoga even more consistently now. we go at least 1-2x/week. yesterday, when we did a wide legged forward fold, i surprised myself because i was able to place my forearms on the floor for the first time. additionally, i finally did a crow pose for like a second! i normally don't even attempt the crow pose because i assume i'm too weak. but yesterday i was in the flow and damn, i surprised myself haha.

work: my workload has been a little all over the place. i'm doing L's old work, and the work i transferred over to her has returned to me. there has been new payroll and compliance matters. we have V joining our team next week. V previously worked in our department and i've met her before on occasions - i remember her to be nice and easy to work with. from my understanding, V will take over L's old duties. i'll still be the youngest person on our team.

week activities: this week, we went to double chicken please (#1 bar in north america currently with taiwanese owners), went to pinos to get dry aged steak, cooked the steak using a reverse sear method for the first time (greatly recommend), completed a 1000+ piece LNY dragon lego set, went to apotheke warehouse, hosted 3 friends for the superbowl. the pro is that i'm happy matt and i are having a lot of fun during his week off. the con is that the extremities of his schedule get to be too much with our studio living situation (it's still either too much time alone or too much together time for me). i felt relieved today when he left for work because i missed having the whole apartment to myself haha

friends: the 3 friends we hosted during the superbowl: R&T, L are all leaving in the next half year. R&T just moved here last september, and T accepted a job in dallas. because his job is a hybrid schedule, he'll be super commuting between dallas and nyc for a few months so that they don't have to break their lease and can have a full year to explore NYC. L is leaving in august to norcal. hopefully, we are leaving as well... so our superbowl party is basically a farewell party for all the people who are leaving the city.

hobbies: i am consistently playing chess with B. i suck a little less now. she used to beat me all the time and i think my score went down to the 400s. now i'm back up to 800s and i'm at a 7W/8L scoring with her. i'm on a 63 day streak learning chinese on duolingo.

relationship: this past year has been pretty challenging to navigate due to expectations (of lifestyle, health, job searching, moving back home) and transitioning to an attending job for matt. residency really felt like he was living under a rock and in constant survival mode. the first year of attendinghood still felt like an extended residency because it was super time/energy consuming, which was against my expectations and disappointing. in fact, he had worked longer weeks (>100 hours) than he ever had during residency. i had a lot of doubts about our future because life was "supposed" to be SO much better after training and it just... wasn't. from his training, he had developed GAD and disordered eating. 1.5 years later, matt's getting the hang of the job and worrying less outside of work. he works 80 hours or less per week now. he's continuing to adopt healthier habits outside of work - eating better, exercising more, taking care of his health. he's at 10 months of doing therapy now which has been invaluable. happy to report that he's really taken over the househusband duties during his weeks off. this frees up mental capacity for me to think of how i can grow my income.

[vent14124114]

8.9-8.14 (wed-mon_

~1000cal avg

8.15-8.21 (Tues-mon)

~1400cal, 64g

x3 workouts

8.22-9.5

Craziness, I felt so hungry and crazy

I think my period must be coming, ate whatever Ip wanted (also NM)

9.6 - fuck, I'm in NYC in three weeks!!! How did I get to 140?!

- limit snack, drink, and meal size

9.13 - turns out the weight gain was just period bloat, and we're back on track. also my breast surgery was scheduled!!!!!!!!! October 26 baby!!!!! i weighed in at 136.5, let's see if we can hit the 129 :)) go on walks!

9.20 - good work, keep it up. Want to hit 129 (and ideally 127)

Went to NYC, XD I'm at 140, JK it was bloat I'm at 137.5 (probs gained 1-1.5lb while eating like crazy in NYC for 10 days which is honestly not bad)

✅10.6

김치찌개 and 밥, twice (500)

Popchips (130)

유부초밥

Bean shakshuka (400)

Apple (60)

Popcorn (150)

Chocolate (600), lol

✅10.7

Matcha latte (50)

Dim sum

Charcuterie

Alcohol and snacks 😭

✅Sun 10.8

1/2 vada, 1/2 dosa, idli, chutneys (800)

Sulbing (500)

Goldfish (120)

Lemon yuzu (200)

Chicken wings (300)

Tuna cabbage thing (150)

Corn cheesecake (200)

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. Got this from @shinefive back in 2018 after completing some of his other books in 'The Savage Detectives', 'Monsieur Pain', and 'By Night in Chile.' Can't say I was a fan of any of them as I think I likened him to the South American Murakami. I got all of those books from @srny btw who she still has my Kazantzakis book. If you see her in NYC be like, "Jesse wants his book sucka!" Then say you kidding but then make a serious face and see what she does before proceeding lol. With that this was slated to be his magnum opus in not only being the longest novel of his life (and most expansive) but one he wrote awaiting a liver transplant and dying before its release. So its theme centers on death...with an emphasis on violence. Much widely it was lauded to explore 20th century degeneration from between WWI and WWII to the late 90s and the femicide cases in Coudad Juárez, Mexico...something I will get into later. The book itself is divided into 5 thematically loose related parts: The Part About the Critics, The Part About Amalfutano, The Part About Fate, The Part About the Crimes, and The Part About Archimboldi. I took various breaks while reading this, although I didn't find the 900 pages particularly daunting, but read 5 other books in between. I just tried to pace it, while doing a little book club with @cai before I finally just felt I needed to finish it and n fault to her, I shouldn't do a book club and recommend such a work at the pace I am used to reading. With that the opening chapter caught my interest then the subsequent three for the most part lost it. The opening about the critics who discover a mysterious writer and bring his work to acclaim was solid. Then once it gets to Mexico it bogs on Amalfitano and the Part About Fate in who is an African American reporter from Harlem in Mexico who never once felt convincing...haha I am biased. But it was the bulk of the book in The Part About the Killings that really turned me off as it is 400 pages of a rather dry journalistic writing style on the femicides in Mexico. So what it equated to was during my Tokyo commute reading day after day of horrific rape/torture/killings of women from as young as 12 (so girls really). Cynically the style kind of worked because it didn't allow him to characterize as much since most of the characters felt the same and I really didn't understand why he had to forcefully inject his cinematic knowledge in every part. I could say in my lifetime of being around drug dealers never once would they launch into diatribes about the Misen-en-scene of a Michael Rodriquez film or Dziga Vertov's montage theory. This is where the Murakami likening comes into it because he tends to fill the mouths of his characters with the same forced references and they all come off the same. But also like Murakami who's only novel I enjoyed in The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, did eventually win me over. The final part of this book was phenomenal! It managed to tie all his extreme digressions, and fucking and killing together to make an overall statement on the degeneration of the 20th century from the gas of WWI and concentration camps of WWII to femicide phenomenon in Ciudad Juárez. Quite a feat to tie so much together. This novel will age well (written in 2004) and even on those femicide killings...if you actual research and look at it now...it is roughly 135% times worse last year alone then it was in the 90s...and like then no one cares, seeing his overall indictment on humanity as relevant as ever.

[queenerdloser]

me: well i could buy a ticket home through new york, but it’s not significantly cheaper, so is it really worth--

me, remembering that if i stay for a few days in nyc i can probably go see some broadway shows: oh okay it’s worth it

[liu-lang]

thank you for all the get well wishes everyone 🥰 tested negative on my PCR on July 22 then I went to my cardiologist - I haven’t had my annual check up since 2020 - and they gave me a heart monitor. I have to go back and do more tests next week to check if having Covid twice damaged my heart 🙃 I’m so mad at ppl who don’t take Covid seriously and the super lax masking I see around me now. This is the same heart monitor I had in 2020 but it can’t withstand the heat and humidity and the adhesive on the left wing is melting 🥲 I went to rite aid to get the strongest hold surgical tape I could find plus Nexcare Tegaderm transparent dressing tt’s waterproof - anyone have recs for super stronghold surgical tape that will stay taut against the skin and not melt from sweat ? if it doesn’t stay on I need to go back into the office and get another one.

I went to see a cardiologist who is a woman and specialises in women’s health (my first time as all my previous ones have been men) but she’s going to refer me to another cardiologist who specialises in adult congenital heart disease - which apparently I should have been going to one ever since I graduated out of paediatric cardiology in my early 20s. He is the only doctor in nyc who is board-certified in 5 different specialties and one of less than 100 in the US who does both paediatric cardiology and adult congenital heart disease. This whole time I just went to whatever general cardiologist my insurance covered. It’s not a great feeling to turn 30 and then have to think about heart failure. Funnily macabre enough, at my last annual check up, my cardiologist at the time told me once I hit my 30s I could see problems and here we are 🤷🏻‍♀️ in the face of everything, it’s really hard for me to find meaning in grad school, like my brain space is taken up by these health issues, I have to go back to work like normal tmrw.

anyway cats make everything better so here’s my 2020 zio with tiny kitty 🐱 this last time even with my work insurance I had to pay $400 out of pocket for it 🫠

[tvguidancecounselor]

TV Guidance Counselor Episode 623: Allan Arkush

December 7-13, 1985

This week Ken welcomes writer, producer, professor, director and all around good guy Allan Arkush to the show.

Ken and Allan discuss Allan's cool office, Allan's record collection, Roger Corman, Emmy Nominations, directing or directing and producing over 400 episodes of TV, the path from 70s exploitation to 80s mainstream TV, having a high batting average of sold TV pilots. Fame, Summer pilot, Rock N Roll High School, telling stories through music, how popular Fame was in Israel, residuals, 80s NYC, directing videos for Elvis Costello, Bette Midler and Fleetwood Mac, the ones you turn down, why 1985 was a huge TV year for Allan, St. Elsewhere, Moonlighting, being able to be a style chameleon, being a cinema fan, having Scorsese teach you film, growing up in NJ, making whatever movie you want as long as it's the movie Roger wants, how hard it is to make good TV, coverage and lighting, how execs are not funny or creative, how bad studio notes are, King Kong, Micky Mouse Club, serialized stories, loving the theme songs from Westerns, Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Loan Ranger, Circus Boy, Abby Singer, The Twilight Zone, Soupy Sales, using rock music in movies, Get Crazy, Zacherly introducing the Grateful Dead at the Filmore East, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners bump, being a nerd, how some things don't hold up, The Dick Van Dyke Show, working with Ron Howard, Doris Day movies, Family Affair, Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, the importance of empathy, the transitional time of the 70s and 80s, East Side West Side, The Bronx Zoo, Hill St. Blues, the importance of casting, working for Bruce Paltrow, Crossing Jordan, ER, police procedurals, the time Ken ruined a shot in the pilot of Crossing Jordan, having to rush home and watch Saturday Night Live, SCTV, Catherine O'Hara's total character commitment, film noir, the zeitgeist of relationships between men and women, the dancing baby on Ally McBeal, Heroes, Duck Soup, The Shining, Lemony Snicket, showing The TAMI Show to young people, and how the future is female.