dresese

More on DeMarco's

I've written about DeMarco's before. After a few trips down there over the past year, my final verdict is the pizza is very good, but inconsistent. The problem is the crust. About half the time, the crust is as it should be: firm and with a good chew. The other half of the time, though, the crust gets a little water-logged, and comes out soggy.

The soggy crust problems sounds worse than it actually is. The pizza is still edible, and in fact still tasty, with the soggy crust. However, it is nowhere near as good as it could be.

By the way, in my previous post, I had not noticed that you can get quick slices from a different door around the corner to the sit-down restaurant's door.

So, eat at this place if you are in the West Village, and hungry for a slice. I recommend getting both a square slice and a round slice. DeMarco's is on the corner of MacDougal and Houston.

Attack of the Art Pirates!

I usually don't use this blog for the meme-type stories, but this one is too good to pass over.

So, remember back in February, when Central Park had it's great piece of conceptual arts, the Gates (big saffron colored gates put around paths in the park)? Now, the big piece of conceptual art here is a small park island that is floating around Manhattan.

Yesterday, a group of what can only be described as "art pirates" attempted to put a little saffron-colored gate in the little floating park.

I love this.

Recent books

I haven't done a post in a while about what I've been reading, but that doesn't mean I haven't been reading anything. Due to my 30 minute subway ride, I have plenty of time each day to read. Here's a few highlights:

• Guns, Germs, and Steel - by Jared Diamond. Everyone has read this book. Now I have too. I really enjoyed it, it blew my mind.


• Collapse - also by Jared Diamond. Great book. The historical sections were fascinating. The section on Rwanda was a revelation and a must-read for anyone interested in that genocide. Other chapters were also great, especially the one on feudal Japan and modern-day Australia. And in the last chapter, he brilliantly refutes the most popular anti-environmentalist arguments.


• Portnoy's Complaint - by Philip Roth. Hilarious!


• Sailor Song - by Ken Kesey. Recommended by my friend Greg when I went to St. Louis. Very well written, funny, and interesting. But the ending was very confusing, and thinking back about it, I'm not sure I even understand what the plot was about. Fun, though.


• American Pastoral - by Philip Roth. Great novel, although a bit of a downer. The contrast with Portnoy's Complaint is interesting. In that early Roth novel, the message is "My parents are amusingly neurotic, and I'm even worse!" In American Pastoral, written just a few years ago by a Roth who is getting a bit old, is a lot more serious, and more like "My child is fucking crazy, and not in an amusing way either."

The most modest pizza slogan ever

Manhattan is a great place for pizza boasting. The corner pizza shop by my workplace has a sign saying "BEST PIZZA IN NEW YORK!". An amazing amount of places have signs like that.

Evidently, here in Queens we are a little more humble. My local slice shop, "A&J Pizza", has the slogan on their box "You've tried the rest...". I'll stop right there for a second. Now, your Manhattan place would fill that out with the standard "now try the best!".

But that's just not how we do it in Queens. No, "You've tried the rest, now try A&J for a change".

A&J Pizza. We're the pizza place whose distinguishing feature is being the place you eat at when you've exhausted all other possibilities!

Farewell to Quicksilver

As I may have mentioned before, I'm a big fan of Quicksilver. It really makes using a Mac very fast, as far as tasks. However, my Mac has been very slow lately, and I was looking for things to kill. When I stopped Quicksilver from starting automatically on logon, things got much faster.

What I'm guessing is happening is that Quicksilver was taking too much memory with it's index. Spotlight does similar things, and is perhaps not as fast, but seems to have a much lighter footprint. Besides, two apps that have an index of everything seems fairly wasteful.

So, no more Quicksilver. It was a nice app, though. Very well designed. If I ever get a faster computer, with much more memory, I may consider using it again.