World Have Your Say

Round-up of available Chelsea-area breakfast sandwiches:

• 23rd & 6th - There's a guy with one of those bagel carts that also has a small grill, there. One egg on a small Portuguese-style roll with salt, pepper, and a liberal amount of butter runs you $1.25 and tastes pretty good. Hard to beat.
• 666 6th Ave. - They probably make plain egg sandwiches, but if you're going to a deli, I feel like you should go with some kind of meat topping (bacon costs $2.50, I think; with sausage it's $2.75). Too pricey to have every day, but everything is cooked well and doled out in generous helpings (ketchup included, unfortunately, even when you ask for just a little bit), so it's perfect when you feel like you deserve a treat just for coming into work.
• Coffee Shop - This place is a little hole in the wall -- really! It's practically a closet -- on 21st St. near 6th Ave. I think it's run by Indian people, but they make conventional diner-y grill food. Two eggs on a roll costs $2.00, which is a little bit rich for my blood, but the atmosphere of the place is kind of homey and the eggs were scrambled just so. So.
• 17th & 7th - Another guy in a propane-fueled bagel wagon. Joe Stroll turned me onto him -- "He makes a sausage, egg, and cheese with real sausage for only $2.00!" -- so I checked it out. It ended up being $2.50, and the sausage was actually pretty much a hot dog, but I managed to keep it down, so it gets points for that?

Nina and I went to the Cherry Blossom Festival at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Sunday. This is a thing I try to remember to do every year but hadn't ever gotten around to doing. This thing, Sakura Matsuri, is a big deal for them; in years past I'd managed to attend some of their also-ran activities, like the Chile Pepper Fiesta, or the Pay-Eight-Bucks-To-Look-At-Plants Hoedown, and now that I've seen this, I'm beginning to think all their events have the same format -- pricey food and a tent with sort-of-interesting-but-not-really stuff going on on the stage.

When we entered, crossing the colonnade to the orchard, there were DJs spinning "Anime-themed J-Pop and J-Rock" -- at the moment we showed up they were playing a song that I recognized as being by Maximum The Hormone called "What's up, people?!" which I recognized because it's the theme song to Death Note on Adult Swim.

Yeah, so I watch that show sometimes. Can I take a second to say what a creepy, mean little wallow it is? In principle, I guess you could take it as a sort of dramatic experiment in telling a story about a protagonist who's utterly, inhumanly loathsome, but that doesn't make it any easier or less icky to watch. Plus, as M-Biddy warned me when he visited a few months ago, something happens part-way through the series (i.e., the episodes that Adult Swim just put up) that kind of snuffs out whatever joy remained in the exercise of watching it. Am I going to stop watching? I, uh... probably not.

But, yeah, so we bought some hot dogs and a Sapporo and then we ran into Eve's roommate Alicia and her friend, who reminded us that there was a koi pond full of turtles. So we hurried off to go look at and take pictures of the turtles. There were a bunch of them, prostrate on the rocks, stretching their little heads up at the sun. I knelt down to get a good shot of one of them with the ol' SD450, and a wasp landed on my shutter finger. I tried to blow it off, but it seemed oblivious -- even when I tried to kind of rotate my finger to wipe it off onto the camera body it hung on, like a lazy cat being dislodged from a lap -- and so I had to wait while it gave itself a short bath, its weird little vertical beak opening and closing as it scrubbed its head and thorax. And then it flew off. As I mentioned to Nina, I had resigned myself to getting stung, but I'm glad I didn't.

Later on, the hot dogs started to bother us... internally, so we went home. I was exhausted! And my calves were sore for a couple days afterwards. Looks like I've got some "body work" to do before summer.