Pet People

My grandparents had a dog named Beebe. Beebe smelled like rotting flesh, a smell my mom said came from deep inside his ears. He was an old dog that would stand up slowly and often skitter into door jams and walls. He would also hump my grandmother’s embroidered throw pillows on the couch with a vitality only negated by the wheezing breaths that shot through his nose, leaving a spattering of snot that dampened the top of the pillow as well. People often say you become your parents when you get old. Following this logic my parents, who are middle-aged, will eventually become like their parents, and that by the time I’m old I’ll be like my grandparents also. And that means I too might have a strange attachment to a wheezy old stinker of a dog.

As a child I never had a pet bigger than my fist. I’m not sure if that was a rule or simply coincidence but either way it’s very lucky. Fishy, Bernard, and Acorn’s horrific deaths would have been exponentially worse had they been larger. My goldfish froze mid stroke during the winter, my “boy” mouse had 26 babies, ate them all, and consequently died, and my hamster came to an untimely end when my three year-old sister speared him with a pencil.

As an adult I generally hate pets. This is not because I am a cold person. It’s not because I don’t like big-eyed fluffy creatures. On the contrary, I love to cuddle puppies, hold toads, brush gerbils, chase ferrets, feed fish, and talk to parrots. But experience has tempered my affections. So when on a summer Sunday morning my friend Frank asked if I could take his bush baby for a week, it was odd that I agreed. As I walked away from his house holding the rustling carrier I went through the checklist list of potential problems: Bubbles didn’t smell like death, he didn’t appear to be pregnant, it was too warm for him to freeze, and I had put sharp objects away in a drawer (my little sister was also now living in a different city and 15 years old).

Bubbles was cute enough for a seven year-old bush baby. Sure his eyes no longer seemed disproportionately large, and his fur was more tufty than it had been, but he had a sweet disposition, by which I mean he didn’t make any noise and when you held him, he didn’t pee in your hand. At Frank’s, Bubbles had a free run of all three rooms, though he preferred to huddle in the dustiest corners where the wall to wall carpeting had collected a fuzz indistinguishable from Bubbles’ own fur. So when we got back to my place I let him out of his cage and watched him wander back and forth looking for a nest-like corner—something made difficult by the lack of lint and the hardwood floors. Bored with watching his pacing I went out on an errand and left him in the apartment to finish his search. When I came back hours later, he was gone.

As a jaded pet owner who had seen much more gore than most, I wasn’t worried. It was likely that he had burrowed somewhere unexpected and would emerge in an hour or so hungry for his canned mushed meat. By nightfall there was still no sign of Bubbles but squeaking sounds had begun to punctuate the stillness of my disregard. I followed the sound across the apartment and ended up next to the radiator, where the water pipe enters the floor through a hole much larger than it’s silver circumference. Using the light from my cell phone I peered down the hole. Although I couldn’t see much, the light was accompanied by much louder squeaking and I concluded Bubbles was most like lodged in the radiator pipe shaft. Luckily it was summer and the heating was off. To be safe though, I turned the dial on the radiator to zero.

My first instinct was to lower a string down the hole. I imagined that Bubbles, in his old age, might be wise enough to cling on to it with his small five toed hands. However after lowering much more string than there was distance between me and Bubbles down the hole, I realized the string was likely piling on top of Bubbles’ head just causing extra irritation. My next idea was chewing gum. I had a large pack of Wrigley’s spearmint gum in the kitchen so I chewed six pieces as quickly as I could and waded them onto the bottom of the string. Jaw still sore I lowered the sticky gum ball down the hole. After attempting some fishing-like motions of dangle-and-pull-back dangle-and-pull-back I gave up on this. I needed something to make the gum stick to Bubbles’ fur.

The string and gum retracted (with a few Bubble hairs attached) I pulled on my sneakers and ran to the hardware store. Tools, which mostly I didn’t know how to use, took on their own creative utility in this problem. Wood glue that didn’t dry right away, but did get very sticky very quickly (said the shop owner), could be smeared on the gum ball for extra strength stickiness. A long metal curtain rod could be used for poking. I bought both and rushed back to Bubbles. The squealing had subsided in my absence. I stuck the gum to the end of the curtain rod and coated it with wood glue, blowing it to the sticky dry stage. Then I stuck the contraption through the hole slowly until I felt resistance and heard squeals. I didn’t want to push to hard, for fear of losing Bubbles to the depths of the building, so applied a little more pressure and decided to wait until the glue had time to adhere. Minutes passed and the frantic squealing continued. Giving a slight pull upward I felt Bubble’s body dislodge and the new weight on the end of the curtain rod. I moved him up slowly. After forty or fifty long seconds, Bubbles tufty fur appeared at the hole. I grabbed onto some of it and pulled.

Perhaps it was the excitement and anxiety of being stuck in a radiator shaft that made Bubbles puff up, but somehow he was larger now than he was when he went in, and he couldn’t fit back through the hole. I taped the pole to the wall with duct tape and stacked some books on either side of it so it wouldn’t slide. Maybe I could wait for Bubbles to shrink? But then maybe the glue/gum wouldn’t hold forever. I decided that sometimes things shrink when they’re cold and that pouring a pitcher of ice water over Bubbles would make him return to his normal smaller size. I filled the pitcher and slowly poured it over Bubbles. Then I gave his fur, of which there wasn’t much to grab on to -- most still below the hole and the rest covered in gum -- a yank. Bubbles screeched out of the hole wet but saved. The tumor of gum stuck to his back was now my biggest concern. Most of it cut off with hair scissors and I decided to put him back in his carrier before attempting to cut the remaining bits off. He was terrified and scrabbley. Back in his cage he enjoyed water and mushed meat and them went to sleep.

When I returned Bubbles a few days later he was doing much better. Besides his patchy coat he was fine. The shaking which had gripped him the day after the radiator incident had stopped for the most part and now just appeared to be an occasional shiver. Frank held him in his hand,

“What happened?” Frank asked, rubbing his finger on Bubble’s new bald patch.

“Nothing serious,” I said. “He got stuck to some gum.”

“Cool,” said Frank. He paused. “Do you wanna keep him?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m not really a pet person.”

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While you were listening to other people talk...

...I was doodling. What do Columbia’s economics, writing, and statistics classes all have in common? Inspired doodling. After you look through the highlights of my semester, decide if you spend your time better than I did. Then send doodles to funnyandinteresting@gmail.com to enter the WHILE YOU WERE STUDYING worldwide contest! Winners will receive their own personal doodle by email.

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Heaven on Earth

If heaven exists it must be exactly like Jerusalem. Not because Jerusalem is paradisaical but because there are so many religious people. On Friday night, the Muslim call to prayer is followed by church bells is followed by the closing of almost everything for Jewish Sabbath. The owner of the restaurant we eat at says it is like mixing three types of alcohol: “it can only make you crazy“ "God is the real estate broker here," he says his hands open to the sky. If ever there was a better argument for not wanting to go to heaven I have yet to hear it.


The first thing I encounter on entering Israel is a long security line. The lights in the building black out. There is shuffling, and all the guards disappear into a bomb shelter on the side of the building leaving hundreds of waiting travellers in the main hall alone. When the lights flicker back on, the guards file back in sheepishly. They are young. In Israel mandatory army service comes after high school so all the soldiers -- this includes the border patrol and security guards -- are teenagers. The girl checking my passport stops to put on lip gloss and laugh with her friend before continuing to question me. She leaves the booth for a bit and returns with the army jacket they all wear and readjusting her belt on her low riding standard khaki pants. When I leave the building, two boy guards outside are wrestling with each other.

I arrive in Jerusalem after five hours of border-crossing during which I develop the flu. If I believed in Allah I would think this was the way he would tell me not to enter Israel (where I was sick nearly the entire time). By the time I get off the bus at Damascus Gate I can barely walk. This however does not prevent me from noticing the palpable tension within the old city walls. In New York, people leave their houses and present themselves on the street at their most fashionable; in old Jerusalem at their most religious. Boys with curls and yarmulkes, girls with headscarves, and roving groups of Christian tourists touting bibles and beads all mix in the streets. In the Jewish Quarter, which was bombed in the sixties, new houses line the cobbled streets displaying plaques that say "Gift of the Lebowitz Family" etc and make me wonder if Israel might not even be sustainable without help from the West, and in particular America. On the roofs of the houses, children's toys and swings are enclosed by barbed wire. Finally we arrive at our hotel run by a friendly Palestinian man who, when we ask where to go in Palestine, says "Don't go to Palestine, just look at me! That is enough."

In the last hours before I leave, I head to see the sites. First over to the Dome of the Rock, which is closed, then Church of the Sepulchre, which is too crowded to enter, and finally the Wailing Wall--now the Western Wall. It is a Saturday morning and the wall is thronged. In books, moments like this always seem to inspire a religious experience. But I cannot feel anything but confusion at seeing the separate male and female prayer sides, hearing the loud moans of the bobbing men and the louder silence of the still women who have a smaller area of the wall and are not allowed to let the men hear their voices.

Whatever is so beautiful about religion that we fight to preserve it, cannot be seen in Jerusalem. What am I missing?

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The case of the conductor, the nun, and the missing ticket

At the Providence, Rhode Island stop the Acela conductor comes onto the loud speaker and announces “Ladies and Gentleman, this is a full train. Please take all your belongings off the empty seats and remember you only bought a ticket for one person and one seat.” Then he chuckles on the load speaker, coughs, and goes off the air. I dutifully remove my bag and newspaper from the seat next to me and make space for an oncoming passenger who turns out to be a middle aged woman, pale skinned, wearing a baggy hand made jean dress and a habit. A habit (I had to look this word up) is the headscarf nuns wear. She sits down next to me, gives me a serious judgment day look, and leans back closing her eyes. She opens her eyes, after this moment of silence -- or prayer? -- and takes out of her handbag a giant green ruggish thing: a book called Handbook of Workplace Spirituality and Organizational Performance.

“Ticket Ma’am?” says the conductor.


The woman leans over and picks up her purse. She shuffles through it concernedly.

“I can’t seem to find it. Oh no. I must have misplaced it!” She looks up at the conductor sorrowfully.

“It’s okay sister,” the conductor says and pulls a cross out from under his uniform.

“Thank you so much. God bless,” she says holding his hand in hers. He then punches a stub for her and moves on down the train. The woman then turns and looks at me with an unusual smile on her face. I take it as an invitation to chat.

“So where are you headed?” I ask.
“Manhattan. I’ve lived there for years.”
“Do you live in a nunnery there?”
“Oh no, I’m not a nun,” she laughs as if I have made a ridiculous assumption. I look up at her habit and she explains, “Oh I just wear this for fun.”
“The conductor called you sister.”
“He did. People just assume I’m a nun.”
“And you don’t mind?” I ask.
“No I love it. That’s why I wear this thing,” she flips the bottom of the habit. “People are always doing nice things for me when I wear it.”
“Yeah. I suppose the conductor was extra nice about that lost ticket.”
“Lost nothing! I never bought one.”
“Wow,” I say. She gives me another weird smile. Toothy and exaggerated. “So are you religious?” I ask.
“Oh no, not really.”
“But you’re reading about spirituality,” I say looking down at the book in her lap.
“Yes. It’s fascinating stuff,” she says and opens the book.

We sit in silence for the rest of the train ride. I desperately want to ask her more questions but I feel awkward intruding upon the silent meditation of a nun, even if she is a fake nun. When we finally get to Penn Station I find myself helping her with her bags in the overhead luggage rack. I hand them to her and she says, “God bless,” and exits to the station.

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Funny & Interesting People Part 1: Wesley Morgan on spending the summer in Iraq and what war sounds like.

I have asked Wesley Morgan, sophomore at Princeton, to write us a guest blog entry. Below is a brief interview with him, and then his essay. Why Wesley? Well, he is a generally fascinating kid who spent part of the summer in Iraq with the US military’s top dog General Patraeus.

Cameron: You had a pretty amazing summer. Tell me what you did.
Wesley: After my freshman year at Princeton ended in June I went to Iraq for the summer as a reporter.
C: That’s very brave of you, or crazy. What inspired you to go?
W: I’ve been interested in counterinsurgency for most of my life.
C: Not many people can say that, especially not many twenty year olds.
W: I’m one of the lucky few then. Anyhow, about a year ago, I interviewed Gen. David Petraeus for my school newspaper, the Daily Princetonian. [Petraeus is an alum.] He liked my questions. And when he found out that I’m also an Army ROTC cadet, he stayed in touch.
C: Are we talking about General Petraeus, the guy that the New York Times is always talking about? The guy in charge in Iraq?
W: Yeah, that’s the one. Last winter, after he took command of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus suggested that I come to Iraq for the summer, and I of course jumped at the chance. My search for funding for the trip led me to Bill Roggio, a conservative blogger and embed who generously backed my project and helped me get credentialed as an embedded journalist. So, after working at a DC think tank for the first half of the summer, I flew into Kuwait in late July for what ended up being a pretty phenomenal trip.
C: And you wrote all about your experience, right?
W: I’ve written a lot about the military details and lessons learned from the trip at my own blog.
C: Tell me a little about what you learned and the piece you wrote for me.
W: Well Iraq is a fascinating place, so completely different from the States or any other country I’ve ever visited that I hardly know where to start – going chronologically or even just describing incidents that happened seems like it wouldn’t convey what the country and the soldiers are like. Since the last few days on my trip I’ve been thinking about how to write about Iraq through a different lens, one that would seem kind of out of place on my own blog maybe, but that would convey a sense of the place. Since you’re so artsy and original I think this blog is the place for it.
C: I’m flattered! Thanks for talking to me.
W: No problem. Thank you.

Here is the essay Wesley wrote for Funny and Interesting:

How I will remember Iraq

Before I left for Iraq, a soldier I know told me to choose carefully what book I brought along, because I’d always remember that as what I was reading when I first saw a war zone. I reread bits and pieces of Gen. Petraeus’s and Gen. Mattis’s counterinsurgency field manual while I was over there, and I did finish Harry Potter, but there really wasn’t a lot of time for reading (except the endless hours of waiting for flights, which I think are better spent talking to soldiers). There are movies and TV shows playing in every waiting area or lounge and on every forward operating base, but more often than not those just seem jarring and weird – watching episodes of Alias while waiting in a cavernous hanger, for instance, or a pirated copy of Transformers in the basement of a combat outpost between patrols, seemed strange and out of place, and not something that will stick with me as symbolic of the experience. What I will remember is the music I listened to here, and probably always associate a few songs with the experience.

A few months back, Tom Ricks wrote about soldiers’ music in a short piece in the Washington Post, and one the songs he mentioned I actually did hear a bunch of times. You know that song “America, Fuck Yeah!” from Team America: World Police, I’m not sure exactly how many times, but I heard soldiers playing that before or after patrols, either on speakers or once when a soldier gave me one of his iPod’s earbuds. Also, I probably played the “Army Strong” music from Army recruiting ads (yes, I do have it) a hundred times because I listen to it when I need to stay awake and write, which was all the time in Iraq, and it was also the background music to a slideshow that an infantry unit called the Black Lions was working on while I was with them. Those are both very hooah, Army songs, even though the Team America one is obviously tongue-in-cheek, and I heard them a lot, but even they don’t really seem like Iraq to me. They seem superficial somehow, and when I think back over the sounds I associate with the trip, they’re really not the first things that come up. Instead, two other, much more random songs do.

The first is a song called “Older” by Colbie Caillat, some new singer I know nothing about, which I got from the iTunes “new music” thing right before I left and which somehow copied itself into my computer three times, meaning that it is constantly coming up on shuffle. That song is completely un-Iraq-like – as one soldier told me with a combination of disgust and confusion when he saw it playing, “I can’t believe you’re listening to that queer-ass shit again,” which is a fair description, at least in Army vocabulary. But I heard it so many times while writing or updating maps and data that it was stuck in my head for a good week in Baghdad, and sort of still is. That might make for weird memories – associating a sappy, incomprehensible pop song with the sights and smells of Baghdad – but it’s true. I wonder whether that association will stick.

Most of all, though, the music that says “Iraq 2007” to me is “Mad World” by Gary Jules (I had to look up the name). It starts, “All around me are familiar faces, worn out places,” and you might know it from the movie “Donnie Darko.” When I first heard it in Baghdad, it took me a good hour to realize that that’s where I recognized it from. Anyway, sometime in my second week in Iraq, a Spanish journalist named David Beriain showed me a phenomenally powerful slideshow of his time with the 1-4 Cav in Dora, with that song in the background, and it has stuck like epoxy.

I’ve been back for two weeks now, and I still play that song whenever I’m writing about Iraq, because it brings back a vividness to the experiences and recollections like nothing else. I’d probably only heard it once or twice before I got here, but now it won’t go away. In Iraq, it was my brain’s default background noise whenever I spaced out from tiredness or was just trying to piece together everything I’d seen, heard, and smelled on a given day. When my mind went blank staring out the window of a Black Hawk, or sitting in the sweaty hold of a Stryker, I heard that song. When I sat down to write on military computers and didn’t have my own music, I heard it the whole time. It was running through my blank mind the first time my vehicle was ever shot at, and again the last time.

Two weeks ago, on the flight out of Kuwait, as I drifted in and out of consciousness while trying to run through the five weeks in Iraq in my mind, that song was just there, in the background, playing over a fuzzy mental montage of carbine-toting, grey-clad soldiers, crowds of hostile Shia pilgrims, an Iraqi cop with shattered and bloody legs, alert officers at intelligence briefings, frightened prisoners, and colorful reporters. The hundreds of new military and civilian faces I saw in Iraq, the least familiar environment I’ve ever been in, were anything but familiar, but when my mind was drifting sleepily back over all those faces on the plane ride – and now when I try to write about it – that was what I heard.

There’s something about that song. Maybe that’s why David chose it for his tribute to the cav soldiers he knew in Dora. Capt. Grim and the snipers on Haifa Street, the hateful glares of the Sadrist marchers, Gen. Petraeus with his intense energy and endless questions, the eccentric interpreters, the brilliant Lt. Col. Peterson, the journalists I met, the black-robed expressionless women, the quietly weeping sergeants at the Stryker memorial service, Lt. Col. Frank and his infantrymen, the soldiers from Southie in that Manchu infantry platoon, the blindfolded Mahdi Army detainees at a south Baghdad outpost, the eerie green drone feed of insurgents being reduced to chunks of meat by an Apache, the Sadrist intelligence source coldly giving us targeting intel on dozens of his comrades for a stack of cash, the Iraqi policeman washing the blood from his hands at Kalsu, the pride in the eyes of the Black Lions. All of those are, in a way, even if I saw them only once, familiar faces, faces I doubt I’ll completely forget, ever.

The Mad World Video--


Some of Wesley's Photos--



To read more about Wesley’s experiences go to his blog.

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My Grandma and the Reason I Haven’t Posted in Awhile

In short, I visited my grandma and she doesn’t have Internet. At length,

Saint Augustine is a small town an hour south of Jacksonville, Florida. It is full of shops with misspelled names--Grampa’s Music, Olde Tyme Candy Shoppe, etc.-- and old white people who still whisper the word homosexual, wonder whether one is supposed to use African-American or Black, and who like to tell stories about their grandkids who work for the World Wide Web. It is also where my grandma lives. And it is also the name of a saint. Saint Augustine, the place, is endearing, despite the impression I may have given you. It is also the reason I haven’t posted in awhile. Like I said, my grandma doesn’t have Internet.

Although she lacks in Internet, G-Shirley, as we call my grandmother affectionately -- also to bring her name into the twenty-first century -- does not lack in much else. Her wardrobe consists of layered galabayahs (from her years of living in the Middle East) and shiny “fancy” things from second-hand stores and yard sales, all of which she embroiders, appliqués, prints on, and ultimately drapes so that at 5’ 10” she stands a towering piece of folk art. Even in her bathing suit, onto which she has sewn beads and embroidered in gold thread around the neck, she manages this look. She has jewelry she can “go to the pool in.” She has a selection of waterproof watches and swim caps to match. And her house is a living museum. Living because there are in fact bugs living in multiple unexpected places, because St. Augustine is in the American tropics because, and also because she is constantly updating, or perhaps adding-on is a better phrase, more and more flair. A museum because everything she has comes in a collection and there is a lot of art.

G-Shirley does not lack in friends either. Generally she introduced me to them saying, “This is my granddaughter, the one I told you about, the supermodel. Tell them how much you weigh and how tall you are.” After this pronouncement I try to simultaneously shake hands with the person and pretend that I don’t know the lady introducing us. This is nearly impossible so I usually look down or away after shaking hands and pull my little sister in front of me. “Cute as a button,” they’ll inevitably say when they see her, and I will be saved.

Among the many people we were introduced to and places we swam while we were not on the Internet, Gladys the shell lady and the water aerobics class stood out from the rest.

Gladys is shorter than my sister who is shorter than me, so in short, she is short. She is older than both of our ages combined times two plus twenty. She lives in a clean wall-to-wall carpeted house with adjoining garage and green lawn and paved driveway a couple blocks from the ocean. Despite all this, her house smells like glue. It is not an unpleasant smell. Everything in her house has small shells meticulously glued to it, so in fact it is not a surprising smell either. Mostly it is an odd smell, one you don’t expect to linger, but does, hanging around casually staring at you, while you try to ignore its presence.

Gladys fired statements posed as questions loudly at my sister and me, “I HEAR YOU LIKE TO SWIM. IS THAT TRUE?”

Yes,” we both said.

“DID YOU SAY SOMETHING?”

“YES,” we both said.

“SO YOU LIKE TO SWIM?”

“YES.”

“THAT’S GOOD, ISN’T IT?”

“YES. GOOD.” And like that we were distracted from awkward glue and preoccupied with the awkward conversation.

“DON’T YOU JUST LOVE SHELLS?”

“YES, THEY ARE BEAUTIFUL.”

“I LOVE MAKING THINGS WITH SHELLS. I WANT TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING; IT’S A SHELL BALL. DO YOU LIKE IT?

“YES. IT MUST HAVE TAKEN YOU A LONG TIME TO GLUE THOSE SHELLS ON!”

“WHAT?”

“A LONG TIME TO GLUE THE SHELLS ON!”

“YES I LIKE GLUING THE SHELLS AROUND.”

Eventually we negotiated our way out and got back on our bikes to head to town. It was only after we got there I realized that the exhilarating hilariously swooping laughing hysterical bike ride to town might have been caused by Gladys’ Glue that we had forgotten about. An odd moment of vulnerability fell over us as we imagined being kidnapped by Gladys and covered in glue and shells. We would be set out on the glass coffee table to dry. “DON’T THEY LOOK PRETTY LIKE THAT,” we heard her yelling at her next victims.

Water Aerobics was an entirely different experience. Rather than feeling kidnapped, my sister and I consented to our grandmother’s request that we join her at the health club for the 9am class. We thought it would be amusing. And it was for the first fifteen minutes while older ladies, keeping their powdered faces and permed hair out of the water, bobbed up and down to Rhianna’s Umbrella –ella –ella –ella. My grandmother wearing her Girls Gone Wild baseball cap and embroidered swimsuit took the prize.

“Do you know what Girls Gone Wild is?” asked my little sister.

“Yes my swim coach told me it is a show where girls reveal their bosoms. It is funny.” The group is very amused with the idea of Girls Gone Wild and everyone laughed.

At the end of the class my competitive grandmother asked us to race. My grandmother is twice our ages combined plus sixteen, or eighty-two. “Forty lengths,” she challenged. “I won’t beat you on speed but I will on endurance,” G-Shirley boasted. My little sister who was never on a swim team looked worried.

“How about twenty lengths?” she asked.

“No it must be forty! C’mon, don’t be a baby.”

Take a pause and imagine my grandmother in her Girls Gone Wild hat taunting my little sister. Obviously, my sister couldn’t resist.

We began to swim. Out of the three of us, I was the only one who could flip turn so I lapped my sister and grandma almost immediately. Understand that this is not boastful; rather I hope to make you appreciate the situation I was in. Forced to race my sister and a competitive old lady. Of course you understand that I couldn’t let my sister win, that’s just the way it is with younger sisters. You start letting them win and soon enough they think they’re better than you and you can’t make them get you breakfast. Competitive grandmothers are a special breed, if you have one you’ll know that there’s no real decision. You have to beat them. The glory of beating anyone will lead to hours of bragging, photographs taken at the scene, emails and phone calls to relatives, visits to neighbors, driving to the Dollar Store because they carry ribbons, awarding the ribbons (first and honorable mention) to all participants, and no, I’m not being facetious. In the end I beat them both and feel guilty for doing it. When my grandma finishes she says, “If you were 82 you wouldn’t have beaten me so it’s kind of like you cheated.” My sister concurs.

This more or less concludes my lengthy explanation. In short I could have said I wasn’t posting because I was high off glue and busy beating old women and children in swim races, but then that doesn’t really explain it.

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And the winners are...

An impressive number of people sent explanations for last week’s odd occurrences to funnyandinteresting@gmail.com. Even more mailed me claiming to be the people I observed. But the majority of emails I received asked me entirely un-related questions. Thus, picking the winners was no easy task and I have included the top three explanations, though only the first is the true winner.

Who was the French man with a name label on his shoe?

The explanations for this conundrum were most curious. The only person who really got close to a feasible reason for the shoe tag was Wesley from Massachussetts who said,

1. The French man might be worried about security, when you have to take your shoes off and put them through the x-ray machine.

2. I tag my shoes when I travel. What’s the big deal? –Jenny, Maryland

So Jenny comes in second, not for explaining anything, but for her honesty.

3. In my opinion the French man on the bus is a would-be serial killer. When you spotted him he was carrying out a preliminary inspection for an oncoming murder. Contrary to your first impression he is very intelligent: the idea of committing murder in a highly guarded place like an airport doesn't scare him, to the contrary he finds the challenge impossible to resist. Maybe he benefits from diplomatic immunity and he is planning to keep a "souvenir" from his victim in his briefcase. Probably when you met him he was thinking about the way to get rid of the murder weapon, bloody clothes, shoes etc.; perhaps he was indulging in the idea of using paper luggage name labels to communicate with the detectives and mock them. —Stefano, Italy

I have no idea what Stefano is talking about but I admire his commitment to explaining so many occurrences. I figure since he’s Italian I can chalk up my misunderstanding to some sort of language or cultural barrier.

Who are the three synchronized texters in Battery Park?

1. The men in Battery Park are street performers, their art is a blend between dance and theatre: they intend to stigmatize today's conformism, compulsive use of wireless handheld devices that support information services, loss of the physical context in human interactions. —Stefano, Italy

Stefano, you sound like a true performance art critic! I like this interpretation because it’s totally bizarre, totally New York, and on top of that, probably right.

2. These men are operatives sent out by apple to make blackberry users think that they are unknowingly part of a weird clan of nerds. Damn, apple is so clever. –Spencer, Brooklyn

Spencer comes in a close second for obvious reasons. Genius.

3. Obviously you saw the Men in Black. They forgot to erase your memory. --Dan, California

Dan comes in third for thinking exactly the same thing as me.

What type of party was going on in the sushi restaurant?

1. One word: Ninjas. –Chris, NYC

First place goes to Chris. While many submissions cited ninja’s in their lengthy explanations, Chris showed himself to be from the inside of ninja culture, Zen, and understanding that the Ninja needs no explanation.

2. The Asian women were ninja’s and the older couple, CIA informants. The women wore sexy clothing because that’s what ninja’s wear and you have to wear a dress if you’re going to disguise the nunchucks on your thigh. The older couple dressed discreetly and conservatively as they have been trained to do. –Aggie, NY

Aggie deserves second because she kept her Ninja explanation short and cited only the obvious pieces of evidence—ninja’s need nunchucks, they obviously wear dresses.

3. An old white couple and five oriental chicks lead to a badly assorted mix: what about an unwilling misrepresentation? According to this hypothesis you could have seen a white couple having green tea and, at another table, five independent stylish oriental girls getting ready for a nuit a la mode; but you compressed two ordinary scenes forging a tricky situation. At this point the question is: why did that confusion happen? Of course in the blog you didn't report a dream, a context in which such a compression would be normal, so I want to point out a hypothetical "side effect" of beans intake. In fact, if my memory didn't fail me, the first version of your report spoke about a red bean ice cream, while in the current version this detail is not there anymore; well, several fungi represent a threat for edible beans cultivation and storing, and they can be a menace to human health as well, once they are introduced into the body: let's consider the eventuality of a weak hallucinogenic ergot-like effect, an individual feedback of your central nervous system to spores aggression (let's say Sclerotinia sclerotiorum spores, usually nontoxic after per os administration). That would explain the badly assorted company and the hesitations in your report: what happened to the woman's seaweed salad and to the man's hot sake? Are the girls Chinese? Japanese? Of course I rule out any literary purport and I can't consider the eventuality of a lapse of memory (you're a smart young woman...): an unexpected acid trip is the most likely suspect. —Stefano, Italy

I give Stefano third place for his sheer creativity and his commitment to explain. However, his insinuation that I unknowingly went on an acid trip puts him in third—come on Stefano, you have to play to the judge! Also, Stefano had so many other good explanations I don’t feel bad putting him in third here.

Why did my neighbor say the chairs were not free, when they are not for sale either?

1. I am your neighbor, and I’m watching you. –Sammy, VT

I’m sorry Sammy, as creepy as your explanation was my neighbor’s doorbell has his name on it, and it’s not Sammy. However, seeing as this is the only explanation I was emailed, I say congratulations on a first prize from funnyandinteresting.

Why did the couple with distinctive luggage see the need to mark their bags with green elastic?

1. The Kelly green couple may have bought their luggage at some discount place that only sells the ugly weird colors. Of they could have had trouble with people stealing their luggage before and want to make sure they can see it from very far away. —Fiona, Massachusetts

Fiona wins and is uncontested. Apparently this was less weird than I thought. Good job Fiona for being reasonable and understanding of ugly luggage.

Thank you all for your creativity and participation.

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Stop Staring Contest

At the airport a middle aged French man sat two rows ahead of me on the bus running between terminals. He wore brown leather lace up shoes and black pants cuffed pants. On his right shoe a paper luggage name label was nicely attached to his laces. Perhaps in case he lost a shoe under his seat?

Waiting in an airport line behind an older couple with practical American clothing and practical short hair I couldn't help but notice the excessive luggage. The husband's matched bags were snapped together in three descending layers from his larger wheeled jungle pattern suitcase. As the couple approached check-in the wife unzipped from the smallest outside luggage pocket neatly coiled green polyester straps with silver fasteners. They unfurl each belt and then put the Kelly green belts methodically around each of the already unmistakable suitcases so that now they will be easily seen on future luggage carousel?

In Battery Park three men in matching dark blue pinstripe suits sit on the bench across from mine. The first takes out his sunglasses from his breast pocket and the two others follow. All the sunglasses match. Another takes out his blackberry and begins to type a message and the two others remove their blackberries and begin to text as well. The make occasional eye contact, but it is brief and spy like. Synchronized, they all stand up and leave five minutes later.

Last night I was eating sushi in the East Village when a fifty something man dressed in a suit and tie carrying a black leather brief case sat down and ordered six Sapporo beers. He opened one and drank it. A woman also in her fifties then came in and sat with him. She was dressed in a loose dark-turquoise pantsuit. She refused a Sapporo and ordered green tea. They chatted and were very much engaged by each other, so much so I don't think they noticed me staring. As I finished my ice cream five young Japanese women, none older than twenty-four or five came into the restaurant and sat down with the man and woman. They were dressed for a night of clubbing in tight red and black dresses, their hair ironed, their makeup fresh. The Sapporos were passed around. Conversation continued jovially and everyone appeared quite at ease with each other. The girls seemed comfortably intimate with the older couple and laughed and told stories at length.

My neighbor takes three chairs and a fan out of his apartment and leaves them on the landing. He puts a sign on them that says These Are Not Free. When I pass him in the hall I ask if they are for sale. "No," he says, "Why would they be?" "Well if they're not for free...?" I begin to reason. "They're not for anybody, not for you, not for sale!" He has been unlocking his door while we converse and punctuates the now awkward silence by opening the door slowly, allowing it to screech while we stand too close and without conversation in the hall.

So many inexplicable events have led me to two conclusions. The first is that assumptions, that if something is not free it is for sale, that baggage tags are for luggage, and that women twenty-five years younger than the men they dine with are either daughters or prostitutes, have gotten me nowhere. The second is that I should stop staring at people because they are probably creeped out.

I've decided to turn this blog post into a contest of sorts. If you have an explanation for any of the above events, or if you are in fact one of the subjects of my confusion, or if you wish to report another odd event send an email to funnyandinteresting@gmail.com. The winners for the best submissions will be posted on the blog and will receive my hearty email congratulations; e-cards may or may not be involved.

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Comic Economics

In today’s “free market,” capital and goods flow freely between countries. But, due mostly to immigration laws, labor does not. We (and by we I mean all of the global community: you, me, the President, and you’re gran’s friend Lola) are allowing this supposedly free market to perpetuate and thereby create much of the poverty and inequality that exists today. How can you, moreover how can Lola -- an innocent, besides her history of sexual deviancy -- be allowing this to happen?

For starters we allow this to happen because no policy maker, no business man, and no other leader in the Western world would ever in their right mind say that immigration laws should be abolished. Few would even argue that they should be loosened. But if we understand that all the capital and goods find its way into the center where the greatest profits are to be made (the Western world), the periphery (or global South) is left not only without goods or capital, but also without the means to obtain them. Increasingly outsourcing is globalizing labor, but without the ability to move freely from state to state, labor can never truly be globalized. As half the world accumulates the earth’s wealth, the other half will have an increasingly difficult time getting any of it back.

As an example I have drawn a comic economic strip where two aliens land on a planet and the inability of one to immigrate prevents him from living life to the fullest, and potentially even from surviving.

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Lemons Uptown?

Around 75th and 9th I hear children yelling, "fresh lemonade, twenty
five cents!" I can't imagine a lemonade stand taking place on these
manicured city blocks with their awnings and doormen, so I follow the
yelling. I turn on to 76th and find two five year old girls who are in
fact selling lemonade. Unlike the stands I had when I was little, from
the back of a wagon or top of a milk crate I would pull down the block
as my mom shouted after me "You need to pay me back for the juice
concentrate," this stand was the phantom tollbooth of lemonade stands.
It was a giant plastic contraption with chairs, cooler, cup dispenser,
and awning built in. Two nannies stood behind the stand and watched as
the two girls yelled out to Saturday morning temple goers in heels and
dress clothing, "25 cents!" The whole thing seemed an awful business
model, but I'll get back to that.

I continued past the stand, walking uptown on Lexington, and ended up behind a mother and daughter.

"What did other kids wear for dress-like-it's-a-work-day?" the Mother asked.

"Jenny went as a CEO like her dad," the little girl said.

"Oh yeah. And what did she wear?"

"A black coat and some fancy shoes."

"How about Tita?"

"She was..an umm...an investment banker!"

"Like her mom. And she wore...?"

"A tie."

It was apparent from this conversation that these uptown children are well
exposed to the business world. However, it's obvious from the lemon girls that they aren't benefiting from this exposure. With a $200 dollar lemonade stand, and two $25/hour nannies, how can selling 25 cent glasses of lemonade to passing strangers ever get them out of the red? Not even a black coat and fancy shoes, like the kind Jenny wore, could save them. Maybe Tita's mom can.

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