ם Attica! Attica!
Posted on August 29, 2006 at 12:57 pm
So Deb and I are running errands yesterday, and we head up to the Astor Place K-Mart (she needed a sugar bowl). Just as we’re crossing the street over to the Astor cube (or The Alamo, if you’d rather), Deb tells me to look behind me. Thinking she’s just telling me to watch for traffic, I ignore the advice. So she grabs me and tells me a bit more forcefully, so I look back towards the giant glass Chase building and see some removable van bench seats just sitting out on the sidewalk with people sitting on them.
“Yeah, I guess that’s pretty funny,” I say.
“No douchebag, look who’s sitting on it.”
And there, hanging out on a van bench seat in front of Chase, is Spike Lee.
Only in New York.
But in a strange twist of fate, before we cross over to K-Mart and write this off as just another Gawker Stalker submission, a crew member stops us and asks us if we’re in a hurry. Nope, we say. The sugar bowl can wait.
He points to Spike Lee across the street. “Well, we’ve got a famous director over there, and he’s filming promo spots for next year’s Oscars. He’s looking for Village-y type people to be in them. He’s going to give you famous lines from movies, and you just parrot them back to the camera. You busy?”
Hell no, we’re not busy. Give us the release forms.
So we hang out for a half hour or so, filling out forms and getting Polaroids taken of us, and before we knew it, Deb was standing in front of the Astor Place 6 station, saying:
“I am big, it’s the pictures that got small!”
-Sunset Blvd.
“Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.”
-It’s a Wonderful Life
And then I’m shaking hands with Spike Lee, thrown in front of some big lights, and he has me screaming:
“Attica! Attica!”
-Dog Day Afternoon
“You talkin’ to me?”
-Taxi Driver
“I coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody!”
-On the Waterfront
And my personal favorite:
“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
-Sunset Blvd.
I have now not only met Spike Lee, but have been directed by Spike Lee. Spike Lee has screamed “WITH MORE ATTITUDE!” at me.
If anyone catches this on TV (probably sometime in February), please let me know, and if you catch it on tape, I’ll love you forever.
Only in New York.
Snakes on a plane! No, seriously. This is a guide on how to bring a snake on a plane.
Kenan Thompson not required.
ם Breaking News
Posted on August 22, 2006 at 12:30 pm
A follow up to the previous post: Grigory Perlman has indeed won the Fields Medal for his possible proof of the Poincaré conjecture, but has declined the award.
Wow.
(Earlier: Nancy Drew and the Disappearing Mathematician)
In the most mysterious piece of math news this year, an eccentric Russian mathematician who “looked like Rasputin, with long hair and fingernails,” showed up out of nowhere, solved the century-old Poincaré conjecture, and disappeared again, leaving behind a $1 million cash prize, a Fields Medal, and mathematical immortality.
If you feel like this is over your head, here’s the takeaway message from the article:
A sphere, a cigar, and a rabbit’s head are all the same.
(More on the Poincaré conjecture.)
In my last post, I told you about my brutally torn frenulum labii superioris. Inspired by such oral gore, my dear friend Michelle, in a comment, decided to share a tale of her friend who pierced “that thingy in the back of their throat.”
Friends, that little dangly thingy is your uvula. Why do I know what that’s called? You’d never guess.
As it were, I have also painfully and bloodily severed my uvula at one point in my life.
This happened when I was roughly six or seven, as best I can recall. A few months earlier, my sisters had received a hula hoop as a toy, and in due time it was broken into a number of pieces due to various bouts of neglect and abuse. That’s fine, we were creative kids, so we played with the pieces of hard rubber tube. They quickly became a trumpet-like toy, and we would make silly noises in them and laugh at how they came out.
And then disaster struck.
While the end was in my mouth, my older sister decided it would be hilarious to bop it on the end. This launched it into the back of my throat, where the hard, brittle plastic sliced right through my uvula.
Ouch. I coughed up some blood, and it hurt to swallow for a day or two, but it healed pretty rapidly.
And now you know my ridiculous history of oral injuries. Tune in next week when I regale you with my tales of orthodontia.