Seventeenth year! Despite not getting on a plane, because 2021, we managed to take half a dozen trips out of town, see several new places, and spend a whopping 58 nights sleeping somewhere besides my apartment. (That’s a remarkably high total for me, and is due largely to our pandemic snowbirding in February.)
Richmond, VA Palm Beach Gardens, FL * Savannah, GA New City, NY * Pittsfield, MA Asbury Park, NJ Newport, RI * Gloucester, MA * West Tisbury, MA *
Interesting firsts from this year include: throw my son a triumphal bar mitzvah; drive from New York City to Florida (so NBD we almost did it twice); play tennis on grass, in tennis whites, on the showcase court, at the Tennis Hall of Fame; get an entire new sunroof, headliner and carpet for our car at no cost; work 8-4 with daily tennis or golf for an entire month; run errands on a Citibike e-bike, and on a Revel scooter; bring a dog on the beach at the Jersey shore; eat Rhode Island clam chowder; turn a side hustle into a career opportunity; break 100 on a round of golf (for the first time in several years); find a starfish in a Bass Rocks tide pool (first time in at least 20 years); play paintball (first time in 29 years); get a virus vaccination at the Javits Center (first time ever).
Basic services are often compromised when living on an island. Living on, say, Nantucket, one probably gets used to losing power or phone service every now and again when the weather gets in the way.
That’s not supposed to happen when the island is Manhattan. So when our phone line went down for two full weeks, without notice or apology from our provider, we decided to switch our service.
This is kind of a big deal in my household. We possess a 212 phone number that we don’t want to lose, so doing a successful number port between service providers is critical. And more notably, until our switch, we still had a phone line served on copper.
I have long espoused maintaining an old fashioned land line. It doesn’t use electricity! In a blackout or an emergency, we can still make calls! (And, yes, tradition.) Heck, even during the signup for VOIP you have to acknowledge that your phone may not work in all circumstances—not true for copper.
And yet, pretty much everyone we call has a cable triple play now, and heck, maybe the police department does, too, not to mention the people and places that dropped their centralized phones entirely, in favor of their cell phones (of which we now have—gah—four. Although the children live on text and video chat, and barely need a number at all, but that’s another blog post).
So we accept the march of progress, and the roughly $700 a year in savings, and we move not-so-boldly into the future. I called Spectrum (with whom I have cable TV and internet service, through a bulk rate building package) and added our phone to it. There was lots of waiting for my rep to cheerfully set me up, then lots of saying “yes” to an automated verification system, then more waiting while Verizon and Spectrum did their number portability dance, and without fanfare, the phone would begin working through the cable modem instead of the copper line.
That led to an additional six weeks of limbo, as Spectrum needed Verizon’s signoff, and Verizon was unsure about our personal signoff, so nothing happened. Secondary prods didn’t help on either side, until we got billed by Spectrum for a month of nonexistent phone service, which prompted an impatient call from me, demanding a refund. That miraculously unclogged the pipes, and two days later, our phone number switched services.
Credit where it’s due, literally: Verizon was helpful after the switch, voiding our last month’s bill, and even sending a $2.93 debit card for a slight overpayment relative to the transition date. Spectrum fixed its extra bill, too.
And now? Our phone seems exactly the same as before, with the added perks of on-screen Caller ID if we’re watching cable TV when the phone rings, and a special ring sequence if the call is from our building lobby. These are not innovations, but they’re new to us, and still amusing. Otherwise, it’s the same old same old.
Tomorrow is the 20th anniversay of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York. You know this, of course. This weekend, many corners of the internet will be commemorating the occasion.
I have never been one to look back on the event in great detail. Many people do (Anil Dash, for example, every year) and I appreciate their reflections without feeling much need or desire to add my own. I lived it, I wrote down my reactions in real time, and for me, that has been enough.
Speaking of which, my memories of the day and the week were chronicled here on the Ideapad, and I still recommend reading them; the page is both contemplative and raw, and it holds up. Also, for really raw writing about the event, my friend Adam’s firsthand writeup is chastening.
It was a blazingly hot summer afternoon as I walked the dog. We walked down Broadway, where an electronic sign announced that both interstate lottery jackpots were around a quarter-billion dollars. I felt like daydreaming on my dog walk, so I stopped at the newsstand with the lottery terminal.
“One Mega Millions and one Powerball, please,” I said to the older man working the newsstand.
“One of each?” he said.
“Sure,” I replied, “maybe they’ll both come in.”
He paused a beat while the tickets printed. “One is enough,” he said.
I caught the replay of the end of the 2021 Tour de France on TV today, and remembered that I inadvertently attended the finale of the 2006 tour.
Floyd Landis celebrating his victory.
How does one inadvertently crash the victory lap of the world’s most famous bicycle race? First, one gets sent to Paris on business; then, one flies early, to cope with jet lag and to enjoy an extra day in Paris on the company dime (thanks, Clarins!); then, one chooses to go for a walk on a beautiful summer day, and then starts wondering what all the fuss by the Champs Elysses is about, and keeps walking and watching.
Not speaking any French, I didn’t ask anyone for clarification, I just kept looking around, and I must have spotted a “Le Tour de France” sign that clued me in. I stayed by the Arc de Triomphe for a small parade, then saw the riders do their laps on the Champs Elysses, then meandered with the masses to the main stage, where I was able to see Floyd Landis accept his trophy from a remarkably close distance, maybe 100 feet (30 meters) away from the presentation (albeit from the back, which allowed me to get pretty close, as evidenced here).
It was a pretty wild thing to attend, especially by accident. I’m not a big cycling enthusiast, but I am a bike rider and I know the sport, so I enjoyed this very much, Landis’s subsequent dethroning notwithstanding. I have a hundred or so photos of the afternoon. Who knew?
I liked working for a French company. Nice travel perks. (Usually.)
Opening acts create regrets, don’t they? I went to a good amount of rock concerts over the years, and I always, always arrived in time to see the opening act, even though I rarely cared about them. What’s interesting in retrospect is the moments where I should have been more dialed in, and realized what a treat I had seen (Tommy Conwell notwithstanding, although I did buy his first two albums).
For exampe: I saw Sonic Youth and Social Distortion open up for Neil Young in 1990 or 1991 before I knew who either band was. Sonic Youth! Supporting “Goo!” But I thought their set was meh, a wall of guitar noise but not my thing. Sigh. Social Distortion had some catchier tunes (one was on the radio at the time), so I didn’t mind them, and it did have the effect of keeping them in my brain for many years after, so I guess that’s something. Neil Young was good that night which redeemed me a little bit—I believe this was the “Ragged Glory” tour, with Crazy Horse, so the wall of guitar noise just kept on coming.
I went to the H.O.R.D.E. Festival in the summer of 1992, to see Blues Traveler (good call) and the Spin Doctors (guilty as charged). We spent the day and saw all five acts. The middle band was Phish, in their trampolines-on-stage period, which was fine enough, and if I’d paid more attention or smoked pot maybe I’d have caught a 30-year wave, but instead I still listen to “But Anyway” and not the Phish station on Sirius XM.
There were plenty of bands that didn’t matter, of course. Good old Tommy Conwell, for example. Forgotten names like My Sister’s Machine, who opened up for King’s X one time (and whom we ran into at a rest stop on the way home). And some marginally interesting moments, like seeing Angelfish, who opened up for (I think) Live, then broke up, leaving Shirley Manson free to join Garbage, and me free to say I saw her in concert before she was famous; and the lucky ones I actually dialed into and enjoyed, like Living Colour at Shea, opening for the Rolling Stones.
But then, in 2013, I went to a Justin Timberlake concert, and the Weeknd opened, in support of his debut album. We knew at the time that he must have been talented to get picked for that slot, but we thought he sucked. Shows what I know.
Every now and again, the “Feels Like” Forecast bubbles into my consciousness—via a tweet from someone with a long memory, say, or a time-shifted reference to the day of the week not seeming right, or when a pandemic reduces our collective view of the calendar to mush. It came up again this week, so I thought I’d tell the tale of my one moment of viral internet glory, way back in the twentieth century.
The forecast dates to the era of Yahoo, back when search was useful but not ubiquitous. Yahoo was a success because it catalogued the web, back when it was somewhat feasible to do so. Early netizens saw Yahoo’s well-organized directory of links as a tool and a note of validity, which made Yahoo something of an arbiter of taste; they also had “New” and “Cool” GIF slugs that website owners craved.
In its attempts to be comprehensive, Yahoo didn’t just organize obvious links, like news and sports; they also had fun subcategories for the humor, games and fun that populated much of the early, homemade Internet (capital “i”). One of the pages I frequented was Cool Links, a regularly updated list of entertaining destinations.
At the time, there were a few online zines that were must-reads, including Slate and Salon. The latter carried some comics, including Tom the Dancing Bug, a strip I’d been reading since college. One week in 1997, this appeared:
The original “Feels Like” Forecast. Thanks to Andy Baio for hunting it down.
I thought that was a stroke of genius, and I also thought to myself, That would make for a funny website.
Now, in 1997, web programming was simple and quick; I was building pages daily for work and play. So I whipped up a real-world version of the Tom the Dancing Bug “forecast,” complete with my own predictions (e.g. long weekend? Two Saturdays, no Tuesday). I promised myself I’d update the page a few times a week, and posted it live.
In the pre-social-media era, there were two ways to get the word out: personal website cross-linking and search engines. I posted it on my site and got folks to link back to it, which started to generate traffic. I also submitted the site to Yahoo. And sure enough, they put it on their Cool Links page, complete with gif. (I don’t know that it ever achieved “cool” status, but for the record, those listings got shades: )
Yahoo’s site used to showcase new links at the top of the page, and when the Forecast appeared, the floodgates opened. Traffic spiked by a few thousand percent. My site host warned me of an unwieldy surge in daily data transfer. Most amusingly to me, an early ad network called ValueClick invited me to add their banners, and I said sure, why not, and got a check for $127 a few months later. The spike was quick but oh so satisfying.
I kept the site up to date for nearly six years. At one point, my friend David Miller and I pulled together a PHP database and rendering engine, so I could set the forecast weeks in advance, rather than updating the HTML by hand every morning. We also put in a visitor poll. But the site was past peak, and the poll never got more than a few dozen votes, and my ad revenue slowly dwindled to zero.
A few years later, my site host updated their servers and broke our primitive PHP, so we installed a new script that keeps the dates current. That’s the last the site was touched. Around 2009, some coworkers and I relaunched the concept as a Facebook app, but it broke before we built up an audience, and the developers quickly lost interest. Not much has happened of consequence since. The Forecast had all of 327 page views in the 90 days leading up to this post.
But! I am still proud of the “Feels Like” Forecast, for a few reasons, all of them deeply personal.
I built a thing, amused myself, and then amused others with it.
I managed to create and ride a wave of viral popularity, however early and brief.
The site’s HTML is pristine. Look at it! The page renders perfectly and it’s 24 years old. No linkrot here, either.
And hey, I made a few bucks. (Very few, but hey!) Those ValueClick ad scripts are still in the page source. Maybe I should turn them back on.
We are learning as a society that extended shutdowns of communal spaces lead people to strange and unexpected behavior. We, for example, drove to Florida.
It’s twenty hours on the road, more or less, from the Upper West Side to Grandma and Grandpa’s house down here; they are up north, finishing the vaccination cycle, and the house, which has sat unexpectedly empty this winter, needed some company. So we packed up—two adults, two growing children with overstuffed bookbags, one dog, clothes and supplies and snacks and four laptops—and, nestled into our compact wagon, hit the highway for a day and a half.
I am happy to report that with good kids, good internet connections, new tires and an extraordinarily calm Labradoodle, the drive was not a big deal. With a nice overnight stay in Richmond, we almost enjoyed it (sort of). And it was totally worth it: so far, we’ve missed out on a cold snap, many days of below-freezing temperatures, and roughly two feet of snow, in exchange for sun, space and swimming. (Although Eli is a bit bummed to have missed the snow, which, fair.)
This would have been our winter break destination in normal times, flying down for a week with the family. It’s nice to anniversary the trip, even in modified fashion. Parts of it almost feel normal.
Of course, reality is everywhere, from eating every meal at home to our family drive to the curbside covid testing center on our fifth day in town. (I can only imagine how my kids will reminisce: “Remember the year we drove to Florida in the pandemic? And then we had to get tested, and we rolled our windows down outside some clinic, and we brought the dog for some reason, and all the nurses wanted to pet him, and then Dad wiped Yogi’s head off with an alcohol prep pad in case they got covid on him?”)
We have to go home soon, back to the reality of New York rhythms, apartment life, in-person schooling, and the like. It’s been nice having what amounted to a four-week vacation surrounding work and school, though, and the temporary suspension of our daily urban landscape. Until we head back, though, we’ll be fully enjoying our time in the south. Because, as we now know firsthand, wintering in warm weather while covering one’s responsibilities remotely turns out to be a pretty good plan of action.
Inspired by (okay, copying) Steven Garrity, I am documenting my life in cars. Unlike Garrity, I am a “car person,” as my choices and accompanying writeups will indicate. And like Garrity, listing all the cars I’ve owned certainly brings back memories of where I was in life at the time.
While I’m feeling inspired (or plagiaristic) I too will do the executive summary he did:
I’ve owned five vehicles.
Two were manual-transmission, three automatic.
Across four decades I’ve stuck two two manufacturers.
There’s been two sedans, two coupes and a wagon.
One was totaled.
Herewith, my cars.*
1986 Nissan Maxima(1990–93)
My first car was my mother’s 1986 Nissan Maxima, a hand-me-down when I turned 17 and got my license. As a teen’s first car, it was fine. It was actually pretty full-featured, since my mother bought it, complete with cutting-edge 1980s technology like a keyless touchpad for unlocking the doors and, critically, an early voice feedback system. Yes, I had the car that talked to you. “Lights are on.” “Right door is open.” “Fuel level is low.” My friends loved it.
Not my actual car, but this was the model year, color, and crazy hubcaps.
I never felt cool driving my Maxima, but I felt good; it was comfortable, upscale and smooth. I kept it until the transmission went (at only seven years old).
Sidenote: my mom replaced this car with a black 1990 Maxima, which was a fantastic car in pretty much every way, from the slick styling to the powerful engine (Nissan called it “the four-door sports car”) to the unbelievable Bose audio system. My brother got that one.
1993 Nissan Sentra SE-R (1993–96)
When the Maxima gave up, I got to pick a car of my own, one that reflected what I wanted. And what I wanted was to have fun driving. I’d been reading car magazines since the age of 13, and from 1990 on, I was a Car and Driver subscriber, and I knew fun-to-drive was my main criterion.
Fortunately, Car and Driver had anointed a superlative fun-to-drive car, and an inexpensive one at that: the Nissan Sentra SE-R. Four times a C/D Ten Best winner, the Sentra was a two-door economy car that Nissan had decided to bestow with the engine from their larger and heavier Infiniti G20 luxury sedan, and they took pains to keep the car’s weight down (no power windows or door locks!) to max out the power. It also had “a shifter that finds gears as if by divine guidance,” which meant that I had to learn how to drive a stick to get the most out of it.
Again, not my car, but exactly the same as the one I had.
Which I did, thanks to my friend Mike and his indestructable Chevy Blazer four-speed, and off I went. It was everything I wanted in a car. It was cute, comfortable, practical, and yet an absolute hoot to drive. I had to crank the windows and lock the doors by hand, yes, but it had a moonroof, a good stereo, and narrowly mounted fog lights that looked like fangs.
This car made me love driving. I volunteered to drive all the time. I took it to 100 mph at 3 a.m. (sober, thank you) and got stared down by a sleepy cop on Route 322 in Ephrata, Pa. I drove three friends four hours to Yankee Stadium in it. I mounted a 6-disc CD changer in the trunk. I learned how to fishtail on purpose.
I got hit on the front left corner pulling out of a parking lot—not a major crash, but enough to set off my air bag (my left hand still has less hair than my right) and to knock the front axle into the engine bay, which the insurance company deemed not worth repairing. The car was only three years old.
So I flipped through the classifieds, and found my car, and bought it again: a used one, same model year, in pristine shape, and in fire-engine red. It was much cooler than my first one and drove just the same. I kept my upgraded SE-R for five years, learning how to deal with Manhattan street parking and enjoying every moment of it.
Sadly, this car also failed before it turned 10, and that was the end of my relationship with Nissan, which had moved away from fun-to-drive as a baseline for its cars.
2002 Audi A4 1.8T Quattro (2002–2016)
In 2002, I was living in Manhattan, so I didn’t need a car. I’m a car guy, though, and I’m from New Jersey, so I couldn’t not have a car, either. I lasted four months before deciding to get another one. My brother had also moved to the city, so we came up with a great idea: we shared one.
I was 29 and soon to be engaged, so it was time to graduate out of the car-as-toy that was the SE-R. My brother vetoed a manual transmission (“You want to keep dealing with a clutch in traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel?” was his winning argument), but I still wanted a car that was fun to drive, just more mature. A friend of mine had a 1999 Audi A4 that I adored; Car and Driver did, too, and they’d put the new model on their Ten Best list, which I knew was a green-light to a solid buy. So we got the A4, with Quattro all-wheel drive and Tiptronic shifting, and took turns with it, a few weeks with me, a few with him, winters in our folks’ driveway in Jersey. It worked out remarkably well for many years.
The A4 was pretty terrific—easy to deal with in the city, yet comfortable for road trips and carpools, and it drove and handled beautifully, as hoped. We put 143,000 miles on it, deciding after awhile to just drive it into the ground, and by the time we finally gave up, refilling the power steering fluid every two weeks and putting duct tape on the leaky moonroof, my brother and I were each married with kids and pets, somehow still sharing the same car we purchased in the Pataki administration.
This is actually my car. You can see and learn more here.
2015 Volkswagen Golf SportWagen SEL (2016–)
Now in my 40s with a family, we needed a capable yet practical replacement for the A4. I’d become an inveterate street parker over the years, so I wanted something small enough to toss around the Upper West Side; I still yearned for a fun car (and not an SUV); and we needed a bit more practicality for our family. Car and Driver’s Ten Best didn’t have any obvious candidates that summer. Then Amy came home one afternoon and said, “I saw the cutest wagon on the walk home,” and we discovered the SportWagen.
This actually is our car, right when we bought it.
We’d lucked into the right car for the moment: compact yet versatile, with a comfortable interior and a roomy cargo area, nimble and quick while getting great gas mileage (I’ve managed 40 mpg highway a few times). We’d backed into a Ten Best car after all: Car and Driver loves the Golf, every year, and this was the same driver-oriented car, only longer.
And for four-plus years, the sport wagon has done what it says on the tin. It’s great fun to drive, it swallows a ton of stuff, it’s short enough to fit into cozy parking spaces yet big enough that we drove to Florida in it last month (four people, one dog, tons of stuff) without leg cramps. Our one complaint was with road noise, which we successfully fixed before our epic road trip with a set of Continental Purecontact tires. We got it detailed today.
—
*My Car is also a delightful children’s book that I read to my sons many, many times when they were toddlers. It’s my favorite of all the early readers we enjoyed. And it’s never too early to fall in love with cars.
Now in its sixteenth year, and as expected, a bit of an exercise in futility. But here we go, for tradition, all the places I went in 2020 and spent the night, repeat visits denoted with an asterisk:
New York * Palm Beach Gardens, FL * New City, NY * (for approximately 180 days) West Tisbury, MA *
gif. (I don’t know that it ever achieved “cool” status, but for the record, those listings got shades: 
)
