Operation Silent Night

$65 for honking his horn in traffic - a NY yellow taxi cab driver was the first to be ticketed by police with sound level detectors on Friday, under Mayor Bloomberg's new program, Operation Silent Night. "Noise is by far the number one quality of life complaint city-wide" is the mayor's reasoning for ticketing honkers, kids playing music a little too loud, guys talking about Britney Spears naked and restaurants whose music seeps out to the sidewalk. I walked by an elevator and saw a cop almost take out his book 'o tickets when hearing the elevator music!

I'm all for quality of life. Giuliani made the city exponentially better by cracking down on quality of life issues like graffiti and squeegee people. I want to hate this new operation SO much but maybe it will turn out well - as most of Giuliani's programs did.

Along the same vein, this time regarding quality of life for drivers, later this month a half-dozen east-west streets in the city will be designated as "no-turn" streets. Pedestrians will be able to cross streets without fear of getting killed and drivers who get stuck on these streets unknowingly will be screwed for 3-6 avenues before they can turn off.

Watch out, quality of life, here we come!

The Punk Kittens

Thank you to Dave from San Fran for the perfect link for a perfect tuesday evening:

RatherGood.com does the White Stripes with cats!

A Pondering for My Readers

Does there exist a 1 page letter (or can one be written) that would kill the reader upon its reading?

Finland Redux

It is a wonderful country and I am sorry I had to leave it two months ago to return to New York. Just came across this blog entry and started to reminisce about the excellent time I had. Read it and learn a thing or two.

Day of the Jackal

Haven't watched a DVD in about a week and so I was itching to get back into the swing of things. I viewed The Day of the Jackal, an interesting piece of thriller cinema created in 1973 by Fred Zinnemann, based on Frederick Forsyth's best selling novel. It was remade (if you could call crap a remake) in 1997 and starred Bruce Willis, Richard Gere and Sidney Poitier.

The film is interesting for its equal portrayal of the good and bad guys. We don't like the bad guy as we might in other films but nor are we particularly enthralled by the good guys either. Both are shown in a very straightforward style, with barely any emotion or even background music. Despite not having a clear lead character/protagonist to root for, the film does an excellent job of keeping our interests heightening to the climax. The film ends in one of the quickest conclusions I've ever seen. The cop finds out where the bad guy is, he goes there, kills him and then cut to him watching the guy's burial. That's it. The end. Weird that a 143 minute film couldn't take a little more time for the resolution.

One thing I have grown to admire about older films is the way they had to depict issues of sex, homosexuality and violence/killing - while remaining within acceptable norms of society and censorship. Everything is so classy, even the way he picks up another man at a Turkish bath.

Anyway, I'd recommend the film as an interesting study in how to keep audiences interested while experimenting with denying them a strong emotional connection to either the protagonist or antagonist. Ironically, one of the things we learn in my improv comedy class is the need to clearly define the "straight" guy and the "crazy" guy. But all rules are meant to be broken. Last week I was in a scene where neither my partner nor I were straight or crazy. The scene we improvised (no preparation allowed, just get up there and go) featured us as complete equals yet it was probably the funniest scene I've done.

If you're interested, come and see my graduation performance on November 5th, in NYC. Email for details. You won't be disappointed!