So...

The blog site has been stultifyingly slow lately, and I just don't have the patience to try to post.

Also, the keys in the upper-right corner of my keyboard are sticky from when I spilled pink lemonade on my computer. The delete key, which I am rather reliant upon, kind of sits there for a second, deciding how much it's actually going to delete, before making this sucky noise and popping back up again.

I went and studied at the New York Public Library the other day - the one with the lions, the one in the movies - and it is as grandiose as they all make it out to be. Those *classic* long wooden tables, green reading lamps, ornate gilded ceiling. Not as quiet as I would have thought, but perfectly good for reading through a few dozen pages of Freud. The books are non-circulating (you can't even wander among the stacks), which means they're always there, only you have to wait for the gopher to find them and bring them to you.

The other night, 2-ish, I was in a bar with some friends when about 20 cops came in, and started inspecting the place. The music went off, the cops started shining their flashlights around and eyeing all the patrons. Nobody who went out for a smoke was allowed back while this was taking place. It all went on for a good while (maybe half an hour), and then they left as unannounced as they came. Apparently - and this has since been confirmed for me - while bars are allowed to serve booze until around four, the "Cabaret laws" dictate that they aren't allowed to host dancing after 2:00. And what that comes down to is that the cops can shut a place down if they see - get this - more than two people dancing at a time. It's like a bad John Hughes movie. Or as Eddie Izzard says, "No smoking in the bars now, and pretty soon, no drinking and no talking."