The Pete's blog/

Exploring NYC and the only thing I could remember from childhood(vaguely) was this place. Seems a bit like NYC's version of the 3rd St.Promenade in Santa Monica. Aka: a cool little place to shop/hang out.

I think I can see a "FOR SALE" sign over there.

What a diference the date makes. It's 7/4/8 and there's a huge crowdhere. Must be some sort of special event 'r sumthin'. :P

So, we found a good square of concrete to see the fireworks show down atthe South Street Seaport and we procede to sit there (along with plentyof other folks) for a bit less than 3 hours (or so).



About ten minutes before the show was to start, rain began to fall. Itgot a little worse than a drizzle and umbrellas went up. Soon, though,the rain lightened up and most of the umbrellas closed.



Then the show started and *all* the umbrellas closed... except one.



For almost half the show this moron kept his umbrella up, blocking ahuge number of us from seeing the explosions over the East River. TheWife, myself and a few others behind us started yelling at the guy toput it down. However, it was drizzling, so his umbrella stayed up.



I hope that guy wakes up tomorrow with huge scratches on his sunglasses.

drop.io: simple private sharing

As I walked down 44th on my way to meet up with TheWife and a goodfriend from LA I wandered into a crowd that had formed around a limo infront of the theater "Gypsy" was performing at. I'm guessing it was abunch of fans waiting for Patti LuPone who starred in the show. I say"starred" because as I passed by one of the crowd on his cell phone Iheard him say "No, it's closing!"



Hm, shows come and go so fast in this city. If you're in the Big Appleand you have a show you know you want to see don't wait go check it outasap.

So the latest line of cutified characters-as-action-figures for kidsfrom Hasbro is one based on the Indiana Jones franchise. Like the X-Menline and it's innappropriate use of a character who was killed,autopsied and then returned from the dead (Elektra) this line, too, hasa questionably chosen character who has been cutified. In this case,it's the Nazi mechanic from the first and best Indy movie, "Raiders ofthe Lost Ark".



There's something that says "not kid-friendly" about this adorablelittle guy.



Maybe it's the fact that in the movie this same character's face getssliced off by a plane-propeller.



Yeah, that's probably it.



Elsewhere in the Indy line of cutified action figures:

The incredibly precious Cairo Swordsman whom an equally adorablebewipped Indy can fell with a single shot from his cartonishly hugepistol.



A truly cutified (and blueified) ghost from the ark who's cinematiccounterpart melted faces.



An adorably animated mummy, inhabited by a snake. In the original"Raiders" the pair terrorized Marion (though only the snake wasanimated).



One other thing is worth noting regarding the set I picked up--the NaziMechanic isn't even referred to on the label as the Nazi Mechanic--he'ssimply called a "German" Mechanic. Leaving the word "Nazi" off of thelabel not only keeps kids "safe" from asking depressing questions butalso turns the whole of the Hasbro toy company into Holocaust deniers.



Yay! Hasbro hates the Jews!

Catching Murakami before it leaves...

We got to see the Murakami Exhibit along with almost everything else. If I hadn't gotten a crappy night's sleep we'd probably had seen itall. We did make it through early and late Egypt, Japan, Korea, China,Cambodia, a bit of Africa and the stuff they have "In Storage/OnDisplay". It's kind of a small place but it was all really interestingand cool to see.



I found Murakami's stuff to be weird and fun but not as incredible assome other pop artists' work I've seen on the web. I did buy a pinversion of one of his ecstatic flowers, though (pic to come).



Pic above is the massive (and amazing) Murakami sculpture they had inthe lobby of the Brooklyn museum--very crazy but very neat, too.

I've been mired in the process of moving from LA to NYC and barely remembered to take part in this last month but I DID completely forget to post about it. I think it was pretty cool that Mozilla was able to get in the Guinness Book for most downloads in a day. And hey, according to the above "certificate" I helped! Sweet!



I know, I know, big deal. Hey, I dug it.

So, a couple days ago I was going over the feeds for my lifestream (now visible on ThePete.Com's main page compliments of Profilactic.com) and was reminded that I have a Jaiku account. Go figure.



I guess they're still in beta, which makes sense seeing what happened to me. See, I noticed I had left my Jaiku account so that it was still importing a few feeds from Twitter, Tumblr and a couple other places and since I was setting up Ping.FM to post to Jaiku, I decided to delete some of those feeds to avoid double posting. When I deleted a feed, I got the above error message.



Yeah--what the hell??



A bird?



A pithy little metaphorical comment about the condition of the servers?



No wonder Jaiku is still in beta. They'd probably get sued with that error message. Sheesh.



Come on, Google! What's up with you guys these days?

I grabbed this from Google News just after midnight on 7/9/8. It seems that somebody in the USG admitted that Cheney had edited the testimony a USG health official gave to Congress.



Isn't that nice? A man with no experience or expertise in the field of environment-related health issues told a government expert in said issues what to tell another part of the government about the issue.



Will this absurd royalism ever stop?



I know, I know--it'll stop January 20, 2009.



But to that I say this: I wonder if the Obama Administration (knock on simulated wood grain) would give into the temptation of getting all big-brothery on our asses. If the last guys did it, what's to stop the new guys?



Of course, I still think Hillary will pull it out and win it. :P

Grabbed this screencap from Google News in the early hours of 7/9 and just had to shake my head.



I mean, REALLY.



A bipartisan panel wants the government to play a bigger role when a president decides to go to war.



Uhhhhh, YEAH.



You know what, Mr. or Mrs. Bipartisan Panel?



THEY ALREADY HAVE A BIGGER ROLE.



They just turned over that role to Bush in the lead-up to the Iraq Attack--or did you guys not study very hard in school?



I mean, any kid who paid attention in history class (or for me, Social Studies class) knows that it's Congress' job to authorize military force. Before we invaded a sovereign member of the UN (Iraq) back in 2003, the US Congress told Bush that he could swing his ability to declare war around like a huge penis in order to scare Saddam into fessing up about his WMD.



Of course, no amount of penis-swinging would get Saddam to admit something that wasn't true, so Bush got to use his war powers. Of course, if Congress hadn't been lied to by the White House, they'd have known Saddam had nothing to declare as we threatened to cross his border.



They trusted the guy in the White House. It's my impression that the Founding Fathers didn't want the guy in the White House to have the power to invade a country--so why did Congress defy that interest of the FF? Especially to a man like Bush who was such a great leader he let 911 happen, invaded a whole country and then couldn't even capture the guy who was behind 911.



This was a guy who didn't even have the decency to make sure he won the 2000 election.



Hey, did you know that when there's a tie in a presidential race the US Constitution states that it's *Congress* that votes on who the president should be?



Yeah, apparently the Supreme Court hadn't heard that either. By I digress!



The USC(ongress) should never have given Bush the ability to shoot his military load into Iraq to begin with, so essentially, since Bush "took office" the Supreme Court, Congress and the White House all let us down. That's all three branches, isn't it?

I took the above screencap earlier today and was reminded of a post I wrote earlier this evening (here: http://thepete.com/…-testimony ) about royalism--as in, our American leaders acting like royalty.



Well, here we go again--former Bush-brain Karl Rove has been subpoeanaed (is that a word??) to testify to Congress (in part) about whether he pressured the Justice Department to prosecute a former Alabama governor who just happened to be a Democrat.



How is this royalism? Well, Rove has refused the subpoena, claiming executive privilege.



Clearly, Karly-boy thinks the law doesn't apply to him.



...as usual, for a member of the Bush Administration.

Ironically, I read about this on my iPhone, which I had no real trouble picking up last Friday. Sure, the AT&T store I went to first was sold out before the line of about a hundred even made it in the door, but after making it to the 5th Ave Apple store and standing in line for three hours, I had my iPhone. Another 40 minutes later, my iPhone was activated and I was out of the store.



Sure, it could have been smoother but what do you want? It's the frakkin iPhone! You think there was demand like this for the RAZR?



So, it's now been two full days since I got mine and I must say that it's pretty damn cool. I loathe adding to the hype-machine, but the iPhone really is an amazing little thing. It's not perfect, not by a long shot, but it sure does some kick-ass stuff.



Oh, did I mention that this post was: