Egg Tarts and Country Squires

I love this story about the Phoenix Bakery's strawberry cakes in Chinatown, Los Angeles. My friend Betty wrote it, and while she was reporting it a couple of weeks ago, I got a chance to join her and spark a few of my childhood memories. Namely, death-matching with my older sisters in the back seat of the car, parked in the bank lot on Broadway while my parents food shopped. My mom insists we were never left alone, but who's paying attention when you're being tickle-tortured on the floor mat of a Ford Country Squire station wagon? The best memory: Pink boxes carefully tied with string and filled with egg tarts, sesame balls, yellow-sponge and taro cakes.

Surfing at the End of the World

Photography by Jason Green

7 a.m. Woke up, got out of bed, rode my bike to the LIRR and three hours later, double-overhead at the end of the world.

Epic 8.23.09

Wheelers

I was riding up Bergen Street a few weeks ago when these appeared in the horizon. They weaved up and around in fluid, synchronous flocks, sometimes splitting up into groups, sometimes coming all together. That's when a fellow biker pulled up along side me and spontaneously began telling me about this old guy who stands up on his roof, waving his arms around.

"So he just stands up there and conducts the pigeons?"

"Yeah."

And it just gets better and better.

Fair Syndication Consortium

We seem to have made some headway in solving this whole "newspapers and magazines are dying" debacle.

Editor & Publisher reports that over a 1,000 publishers -- including the NYT, Washington Post, Conde Nast, and even Gawker -- have band together to "track sites that swipe and re-use content from the original creators. The Consortium would then contact the site as well as the networks serving ads for compensation." So that means I'd owe E&P some money, eh? Or is this considered fair use? Actually, since the article doesn't disclose whether E&P's publisher joined, I'm assuming not.

Here's hoping it all works out smoothly.

Bikes and Skinny Jeans

Urban Outfitters now has a portal linking their shoppers to custom-built Republic bikes. Though my instinct is to make some sarcastic comment (see "Ipecac" reference here), I actually think it's not repulsive. Bikes should be as mainstream as hipster fashion. That said, I'm much more into this and this.

OMG

Planters Cheez Balls are dead. And have been for quite awhile.