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Reading, The Tough Life of a Liberal Blogger by Justin Darr put me in mind of everything which is wrong with Fahrenheit 9-11 and all forms of bigots who try to force their transparent political agenda on the majority of people who occupy an increasingly crowded space somewhere near the political centre.

I am probably one of the few people in the world not to have watched Michael Moore’s polemic Fahrenheit 9-11 prior to last year’s US presidential election. Having read and heard so much hype about this film and it having been recommended to me by people who’s opinions I very much respect, I spent a couple of hours the week before last sitting down to watch Fahrenheit 9-11 when it was screened on Channel 4 here in the UK.

Regardless of who won the popular vote in the US in 2000, Fahrenheit 9-11 doesn’t challenge the more important systemic problems with an electoral system which would allow for a ruling and ultimately an outcome which does not reflect the popular vote.

The film becomes distracted with details such as why George W Bush did not immediately rush out of a classroom full of kids at the exact moment that he heard his country was under attack on 11 September 2001. Would such a knee-jerk reaction from Bush have actually saved lives? With Bush’s clearly limited intellectual capacity, taking a couple of moments to gather his thoughts before opening his mouth was probably a sensible move under the circumstances?

Fahrenheit 9-11 does as Justin Darr does in insulting the reader’s/viewer’s intellect by stereotyping and peddling cliché to attempt to make an argument. Darr suggests that folk of a liberal persuasion spend their weekends taking drugs and are unemployable while Moore played up heart-rending images of distraught mother’s who’s children had gone to war. Guys using these stereotyped images in this way is outmoded. Surely what passes for journalism and film-making has moved on since Vietnam?

Darr could be right that Conspiracy Theorising is rampant at the moment. But he fails, as Moore does, to recognise that the obsession with the notion that ones political opponents are unduly attached to a given Conspiracy Theory, is in and of itself pretty paranoid. Genius is not required to appreciate the simple truth that Conspiracy Theorists are not exclusively affiliated with any particular ideology.

The irony in Darr’s accusing CNN and CBS of being prejudiced is hilarious when one considers how Fox choose to represent current a fares. I have a clear recollection of tuning into Fox News not long after American troops had passed over the border into Iraq in April 2003 and during a discussion about the cost to human life hearing one correspondent blatantly change the emphasis of the discussion by asking what the war would do to the cost of gasoline in the US! The problem which faces Darr’s readers is similar to that which confront viewers of the Moore movie. These guys come with a political agenda, attacking what they do not or cannot understand, while at the same time attempting to spoon-feed it to a sophisticated connected public.

Many who opposed the war in Iraq do not subscribe to Conspiracy Theories about the outcome of the 2004 election in the US. Many who did not vote for Bush acknowledge that the American electorate has spoken and has chosen to have Bush as US president for the next 4 years.

By it’s very nature American foreign policy extends around the world, and it has been suggested that the US of today is as influencial and is as powerful as the Roman empires of old. This topic is something in which we all must take an interest. While, like many I can’t buy into this form of political pingpong, Barr and Moore may be succeeding on one level, i.e., getting people switched on to world affairs. However, evangelising any given philosophy too vigorously is just as likely to turn people away from your cause. While someone somewhere is logging on, someone somewhere else has just logged off.

I’ve been following this for weeks on the Team Ellen site.

Got instant messaging with one of my x-girlfriends on Messenger earlier:

XGF: hey do you remember when you got them kids suspended from school for sending you nasty emails?

DW: hahaha, jasus I’d almost forgotten about that rofl

XGF: god i can’t believe how much i’ve changed since then

DW: well it’s important to change a little bit everyday

XGF: that sounds like some self help mumbo jumbo

DW: yeh it probably is. But if nothing changes then everything stays exactly the same, how interesting is that?

XGF: it’s weird tho…i mean i’ve been getting quite introverted in my old age, i think that goes with not having much of a social life, and it made me get very nostalgic about the time before i went away to uni….not a pleasant nostalgia either just weird….but now it’s just all shot back into perspective and i can see how different i am,

XGF: all the hopes i had at the time that were subsequently ignored…i can see how much i’ve changed in that respect and it’s weird

DW: I’m different from 3 months ago. going to South Africa was pretty mind bending. I guess we’re meant to change and grow and all that crap.

DW: I’d say if you hadn’t changed in the last 5 years then it would be stranger no?

XGF: yeah i guess i’ve not had any one major life changing experience in such a short space of time….i mean uni changes you but it’s spread over several years so it’s more like lots of small things so you don’t notice it all at once

DW: yeh and I notice that working changes people too. All the people I know in their late 20s and who are in work have really changed a lot in the last couple of years.

XGF: yeah work certainly regulates your life

XGF: you wind up having to get sensible

DW: I think when you’ve only got a very small proportion of the day to spend on yourself, it can make one focus on what is important

XGF: ideally yes, but it doesn’t always work out like that

XGF: altho it does make you appreciate your free time more

DW: well it usually doesn’t always work out like that, but the very fact that it makes some folks reevaluate what’s important to them is significant

XGF: before i got my first full time job i’d spent three months on the dole, just out of uni, totally broke and in a new town where i couldn’t afford to get to know it properly…the most depressing three months of my life….so when i started my job i was too excited about actually having money in my account every month to worry about the important things

DW: yeh, but then the novelty wore off?

XGF: it was a shit job more to the point

XGF: i always appreciated the financial security of a monthly wage

DW: what and you don’t have one now?

XGF: i still appreciate it

DW: good

XGF: i think if i didn’t have to spend so much of my free time commuting, my life would be pretty pleasant all in all

DW: but there’s a difference between appreciating it and getting excited “every month”?

XGF: oh, and if i had more friends in the area

XGF: oh god i do get excited

DW: If I had a hammer…

XGF: what would u do if u had a hammer

DW: I’d hammer in the morning.

DW: obviously

Well they said it would. although it took a while to appear. Not the instant gratification one would expect, but hey it’s early doors and I’ve only just lost my blog virginity so still plenty to learn.

My gf called to wake me up, but was amazed to find me already awake. Hadn’t really slept, but then I usually don’t. No change there then.

I did some shopping online, nothing exciting, bread and milk and the like. Ok time to put the kettle on, I am apparently on the internet radio in an hour or two.

TTFN.

Everyone it seems.

3 … 2 … 1 and lift off of the space shuttle blog! Spewing yet more insecure vitriol out on to the Net. Like the Net needs more of this pathetic self-indulgent cack? Personal expression? Yeh right. An outlet for sad geeks with no friends or lives, to desparately try and give their lives or should that be our lives meaning, by inflicting our feckless opinionated ramblings onto the world in general. Oh and if they, we, can get away with a bit of Googlewashing at the same time, then all the better.

Right, now I have got that out of my system, a very warm welcome and all that jazz. I hate blogs. No I mean I really hate blogs. So why have I started one. Well there may be some possible reasons which may or may not be entirely true. But then you did not come here for the truth, or maybe you did?

1. I created a blog to try and get inside the insidious mind of the rampant bloggers who seem to be taking over. Taking over what? That, I have yet to figure out.
   
2. I created a blog because I subscribe to the “if you cannot beat them, join them” school of thought.
   
3. I created a blog because I am desperately unhappy and need to vent along with the rest of you.
   
4. I created a blog because I am a procrastinator and am engaging with any destraction however small to avoid doing any real work.
   
5. I created a blog because … oh I donno, it’s probably just a blip. Normality will resume shortly.

We woke on Wednesday morning feeling thoroughly dejected with ourselves; OK, we’d wasted not a second of what had been a belting trip, but the granddaddy of all good things was about to come to an end. We took things at a leisurely pace, a final breakfast in Lindy’s filling the time before checkout. We then threw our bags in with the friendly left-luggage service. Although we were supposed to have obtained some forms from the reception desk for the use of this service, our English politeness must have paid off, as the guy in charge just said “Ah, leave them with me” and in doing so saved us sixteen dollars. This done, I found myself inexorably pulled back towards the DVD shop opposite Macy’s for another splurge, and then to the Internet café to alleviate my IM addiction. As the machines were not equipped with access software Dave had little to do while I pottered around my contact list, so I kept it short and within minutes we were on our way back up towards Times Square. The weather had turned humid and rainy that morning for the first time in the trip, and the added room required by umbrellas had turned busy crowds into melees filled with eye-gouging prongs. Navigating ten blocks was a stressful and lengthy chore, and we were thoroughly irritated and dampened by the time we once again visited Virgin Megastore. After lunch at Pizza Hut we realised time had once again got the better of us: we had under an hour to get back to the hotel, which would have been plenty but for the maniac crowds and umbrella ninjas. Taking a route which kept us off main thoroughfares, we were back inside our hotel lobby with at least thirty minutes to spare, and before recovering our bags Dave once again answered the call of nature. As we grabbed our suitcases, Dave suddenly patted his pockets, turned to me and said in a panicked voice “Rob, I think I’ve lost my passport”.

As the man Williams is not (usually) given to practical jokes or panic I knew we had a serious problem. If the passport had been left in the pizzeria or worse, dropped in Times Square, we had around twenty minutes to get up there, find it, and get back to catch our connecting bus. Considering a taxi round-trip with limited remaining funds, Dave suddenly said he thought it might possibly have been left in the toilets. It was at this stage it transpired the concierge had been unable to unlock the gents’ toilet, and had instead allowed Dave in to use the ladies. This meant we had to run up to the toilets, mindful that a trip to Times Square might still have been necessary, and demand to be let in to the ladies toilets on some laughable pretence of a passport being in there. Luck was on our side however, and some fellow Britishers nearby had heard our plight. A Yorkshire lass, equipped with a room key which would open the door, ran up to the toilet with me and, thankfully, there was the buff envelope containing all Dave’s travel documentation. Disaster had been averted, and Dave was happy enough to be assaulted by another female, spontaneously hugged by the Yorkshire lass’s mother.

The crisis averted, all that remained was to wait for our connecting bus, which arrived on time at a quarter past three. We climbed aboard, only to pile out a short while later at Grand Central Station, and we then waited for the bus which would take us to the airport. This showed up in good time and we climbed aboard to settle down for the hour-long trip. Yet more earthy characters were aboard with us, a loud lady behind Dave and I proclaiming recent terror alerts to be “just an excuse to bomb Syria”. Once we set off, we anticipated a ride lasting maybe an hour, but in the event we did not make it to JFK until half past six in the evening. We later learned a severe chemical spill had engulfed the city in traffic chaos, and we were lucky to have made it to the airport when we did. We checked in at a fair old pace and then headed for the security gate. The security at JFK is unimaginably tight, as you might expect, but the scrutiny we received was over the top. Laptop out of bag, coats off, belts off, shoes off, skin off. It took a good ten minutes to make it through the magnetometer, not helped by Dave’s irrational but now perfectly understandable refusal to let go of his buff envelope.

After we reassembled ourselves and our luggage, Dave took the opportunity to mangle his own card in the duty free, purchasing perfume for his sister and cigarettes for himself, and resisting the impulse to buy any 1.75 litre bottles of Bushmills or Maker’s Mark. We queued and boarded the plane, waving goodbye to the city for the final time, but agreeing that nothing short of Dave actually losing his passport completely could have spoiled the trip. The flight was as expected, dragging, and not helped by the passenger in front of me who insisted on reclining his seat all the way back, to the point where it was inches from my nose. Even if I reclined my own seat, it left me virtually no room to eat, and I had to ask several times before I ended up with enough room. Conspicuous by its absence too was the ‘multimedia’ entertainment system we’d enjoyed on our way across. The films on offer started and finished at static times, and the one genuinely redeeming feature was the presence of bona fide games from the Super Nintendo library. The Legend of Zelda at 38,000 feet is an experience to treasure. On touchdown we were once again picked up by the finest human being alive and shuttled away from Heathrow, stopping only to demolish a full English breakfast as our first meal back on English soil. The first visit for Dave and second visit for myself to the greatest city on the planet was well and truly over, done and dusted, finished, completed, but it had been everything we’d expected and more. Instead of trying to reproduce that first awed trip we’d just hit the city with everything we had, and we’d given a very respectable account of ourselves. I can’t help but wonder what the trip will be like when I return in another seven years’ time, although I have a feeling it will be sooner.

I had paced myself the previous evening, and taken the opportunity to down a pint or two of water before turning in, and so the morning after Dave was feeling the pinch of Sam Adams’s finest while I was raring to go. We decided, for the sheer randomness of it, to seek adventure whilst finishing the last of the items on our checklist – Brooklyn Bridge, the financial district proper, Pier 17 and Times Square at least one more time. We managed another reasonably priced and enjoyable breakfast at Charlestons, even though our order was hopelessly wrong as we ordered in English. Who was it made the remark about two peoples divided by a common language? We then caught the subway down to Battery Park and jumped on the free Staten Island ferry for another trip across the harbour. This turned out to be an excellent hangover cure for Dave, as he spent most of the trip clutching at the bar and letting the refreshing wind blow in his face. I was jumping around the ferry like a child, conscious of the fact that this was our last full day and wanting to fill it with as much variety as I could. After half an hour or so the ferry docked on Staten Island, which I had thought to be a tiny island like Ellis or Liberty, although Staten Island is nothing like this – it is a thriving community all of its own, and more than half as big as Manhattan. Apparently it briefly considered seceding from the city for some trifling issue in the last century (possibly “the sake of it”), but in the end decided to remain linked. We were turfed off the ferry onto a bus terminal which rapidly emptied of people, leaving us without a clear idea of where we wanted to go. The Rough Guide detailed an attraction: the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art located in the centre of the island and apparently a real hidden gem, so we decided to strike out in this direction. I tried to ring ahead, only to be informed I was ringing a Chinese takeaway. Seeds of doubt blossomed when I checked the guide again – the museum was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and apparently farmed out its facilities to a takeaway company in the meantime. A little bemused, we decided to jump on the first bus which came our way and ride it until somewhere interesting appeared on the horizon. For thirty gently worrying minutes, nothing much did. Staten Island is all wood frontages and overhangs, under which it’s easy to imagine shotgun-toting Republicans rocking gently in their chairs and discussing the relative merits of passing tumbleweeds. In short, it’s a terrifying slice of smalltown America, far too close to Manhattan for my liking.

We remained on the bus until it reached the Yukon Terminal, and as the engine switched off we realised we had no choice but to get out. We ended up standing in yet more blistering sunshine, a good fifteen miles from Manhattan, unable to see the familiar city skyline, and the only sign of civilisation a small hot dog stand. We had prided ourselves on our ability to find good in every situation, and anyway Dave couldn’t resist the temptation of yet more hot dogs, and so we got ourselves some snacks while waiting for the bus back across the island. The hot dog stand man was a model of friendliness, immediately identifying us as British (is it the nose?) and demanding that we try his secret weapon on our hot dogs – a small but dangerously coloured bottle labelled, simply, “The Hottest Fuckin’ Sauce”. Braver, or perhaps more stupid than the man Williams, I sallied forth and allowed the grinning hot dog stand man to place a tiny quantity of this lethal-looking concoction on my hot dog. Swallowing was only the *start* of my problems. A full litre of water later, I could still taste the damn stuff, and my tongue felt like I’d been gargling bleach. Perhaps gratified to have found some victims so early in the day, Mr. Hot Dog Stand With Nuclear Capability told us hilarious stories about this sauce; he’d made two Mexicans cry with it, a huge black trucker refused to admit it was blowing his face off and manfully finished a dog drenched in it, his freely sweating forehead the only indicator of the turmoil within. Dave and I have never once made any pretensions toward common sense, and we immediately purchased two bottles from Mr. Hot Dog Arms Dealer before jumping back on the bus. We’d travelled fifteen miles for free and for no reason, but we’d gotten The Hottest Fuckin’ Sauce, and that provided the village idiots with more than enough gratification.

Travelling back through more strangely quiet residential neighbourhoods towards the ferry terminal, we decided to properly visit and photograph Wall Street once we returned to the mainland. The free ferry quickly appeared and whisked us off the most bizarrely un-New Yorkish section of New York. Once back on the mainland we set off for the financial district, and realised we were there when we saw the New York Stock Exchange. This building has an ever-so-tiny flag draped across the expanse of its frontage, but we were disappointed to find heavy security preventing us from viewing the trading floor. We contented ourselves with visiting the Federal Reserve building, which fans of Die Hard with a Vengeance will remember is the building Jeremy Irons’ comedy German character empties of its gold reserves. A quiet building with an extensive collection of art, this is a great distraction for half an hour, and additionally features the famous George Washington statue outside.

Upon leaving the Federal Reserve building, we spent a good few minutes considering an issue both of us had thought about long and hard: whether to pay a visit to the site of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Centre. The idea of turning a site where so many people lost their lives into a tourist attraction struck both myself and Dave as in the worst possible taste, and not something we wanted to be a party to. However places like the Somme and Ypres are now sites of education, and in Hiroshima and Nagasaki there are monuments to guarantee “rest in peace, for it will never happen again”. People visit these sites to pay their respects, and so our decision was to go briefly and do this, and leave after a decent period of time. When we arrived there, I was shocked by the site itself – where the towers once were there is a massive crater six stories deep and over a hundred metres square, with some isolated girders and struts too deeply embedded for construction crews to extract. A fence separates the crowds from the site, and while Dave and I took as little time as possible, I was a little annoyed to see many taxis pulling up and people piling out, and the likes of mobile phones and personal stereos disturbing the calm. Both more than a little uncomfortable, we left and headed across to Pier 17, and the conversation was stilted and almost silent for a good while afterwards – which, as anybody who knows either of us will realise, is very unusual.

Pier 17 is (naturally) a pier, but it is also a decent shopping centre and collection of eateries. Various ornamental galleon and schooner-type vessels are moored beside it, and it remained as busy and well-outfitted as I remembered from the previous visit. Sighting the “Cyber Cigar” internet café and cigar emporium, we took time out to have a drink and lie back in the sun. Dave spent a relaxing half hour outside Cyber Cigar supping away at the beer and taking in the ambience while I went present shopping; taking some photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge and the impressive ships while I had the opportunity. I also bought a Romeo y Julieta cigar which has not been smoked just yet, but with my sister’s wedding on the horizon, it will not remain so for long. We left Pier 17 after I’d seen all I wanted to, and wandered back through the financial district to a tube station. By now it was coming up to six o’clock in the evening, and the subway was full to bursting. As bad luck would have it we’d managed to catch a slower tube which stopped at every station, and so we were feeling a little bedraggled when we made it back to Penn Station. We had planned to fill the time between check-out and our airport connection on the last day with another Matrix Reloaded viewing, we were both feeling quite shattered after the pace of the last few days. The Red Hot Chili Peppers guy had not been in touch, so we made the decision to spend our last evening with another viewing of the Wachowski brothers’ finest, before drinking our last in Niles. The film stood up very well to a second viewing, and the barman in Niles by this time was on first name terms with us, asking us how we’d got on that day. Some Bushmills whiskey rounded the trip off in fine style, although around 1am or so I had the urge to take a wander up to Times Square to see the mesmerising lights one last time.

Yet another early start greeted us on Monday morning, as we took the opportunity to visit the Lindy’s on Times Square. It was this restaurant where I had breakfasted with my parents almost every day on the previous trip, so it was nostalgic to return there. Once again pancakes, maple syrup and coffee were the order of the day, and after a quick look in the Rough Guide we decided to visit the American Museum of Natural History. This is one of the largest museums in the world, and features the recently refurbished Hayden Planetarium, a suspended 30-metre sphere inside a lattice of steel and glass. As an architectural achievement it’s extremely impressive, and to have factored practical purpose into such a striking design makes it all the more so. Once at the museum we bought a multi-event ticket for 27 dollars all-in; this gained us access to both planetarium shows, a light show which promised to re-enact the Big Bang, two Imax showings, and a special exhibit which the museum was currently providing dedicated to the life and work of Albert Einstein. All in it promised to be an interesting and varied day, and the by-now-compulsory audio tour was available. After obtaining this and once again providing credit card information as collateral, we set off around the base of the main exhibit, dedicated to space exploration and astrophysics. The Scales of the Universe section was particularly interesting, orbiting the 30 metre sphere and using the massive centrepiece to give an idea of scale – the idea being, at the beginning we were supermassive and the sphere constituted the cosmic horizon, and upon progressing around the exhibit we gradually grew smaller. At each stage a point of comparison was made; for example a small mass in front of us constituting the Oort Cloud if the sphere was the diameter of the galaxy. The most memorable of these was the earth represented as a sphere the size of a football, and the 30-metre sphere the sun. Gradually moving further and further around until the sphere was a hydrogen atom and we were the size of a subatomic particle, we made our way into the Big Bang video, a sort of inverted planetarium with a concave display in front of us. This turned out to be short and more noise and show than information, but it was still an impressive preview of the planetarium itself.

Upon leaving the Big Bang film section a circling walkway took us down to the museum again. This walkway had a novel feature: from the beginning, time gradually advanced from fifteen billion years in the past to the present day at the base of the walkway. The walkway itself circled the planetarium and was studded with information, until at the base the entirety of human history was contained within the width of a single human hair – a great way of getting some perspective, and well in keeping with the theme established by the Scales of the Universe section. Afterwards we made our way to the queue for the planetarium. This constituted two short films, one explaining our place in the cosmos (narrated by Tom Hanks) and one considering the search for extra-terrestrial life (narrated by Harrison Ford). To use big-gun Hollywood actors to lend credence to what could otherwise have been quite a dour affair worked extremely well, and the films themselves were expertly produced. The star projector itself rose out of the centre of the planetarium once the audience was seated; the walkway retracted, and a hulking black lump of plastic and metal machinery gradually rose into view – all very Star Trek. The Zeiss projector itself was capable of accurately projecting more than nine thousand stars, and also reproducing the twinkling effect produced by the Earth’s atmosphere. To a habitual stargazer, the accuracy doubtless adds goosebumps to what is already a very impressive setup. The two films, meanwhile, did not stop at projecting the stars; added in was a host of information and visual aids to the commentary. The latter was certainly lost on one American girl sat behind us – upon hearing Tom Hanks comment “It gets me every time” at seeing the Earth in amongst its galactic environs, she responded “Oh shut up, Tom”.

These remarkable planetarium films completed, we went in search of lunch, and found it in the well-equipped museum restaurant. We realised we didn’t have long before our Imax films would start, so we quickly demolished some strange salad combination (mozzarella and cherry tomatoes?) and failed to notice the burger bar until we were leaving. The lack of beef on at least one occasion probably did Dave some good. So it happened that we left the museum café in a fair hurry to locate the Imax cinema in time for our film, a presentation about coral reefs which promised some outstanding underwater photography. I noticed as we took our seats that the projector was shining a series of information slides at a tiny central portion of the massive Imax screen, and sure enough, when the main event was showing large areas of uniform colour, that central portion had been discoloured by the uneven light exposure. One of the biggest movie screens in the world was a victim of screen burn! Get a screen saver lads! This aside, the coral film’s photography was everything promised and provided an informative account of receding corals. One of the participants in the film even allowed a tiny “scrubber” fish which normally would deal with the teeth of larger fish, to swim into her mouth and clean her teeth – amusing and mildly repulsive in equal measures.

Once the film was completed, Dave suddenly twigged he’d misplaced his audio guide unit, and we searched our seating area to no avail. We retraced our steps back to the restaurant, only to be informed that it had been found and returned to the kiosk. Double checking, Dave sweated slightly when he realised, had it been stolen or lost altogether, the full cost of seven hundred and fifty dollars would have been debited to his card. Promises of marriage to the kiosk girl were met with a deer-in-headlights expression, and I dragged the man Williams away before he could vault the desk and assault her. We realised after this that, as usual, time was marching onward and we had yet to cover the Einstein exhibit, so we found ourselves wandering through this comprehensive account of the man himself and his work. Relativistic physics is explained via a host of visual exhibits, including a series of clocks set to run from the time of Einstein’s birth, and running at relative fractions of the speed of light. As any fule knows, the more rapidly you travel, the greater the time dilation between you and any objects whose speed you’re exceeding. So an imaginary clock travelling at 99.9% of the speed of light relative to our stationary position (besides having the mass of a respectable number of galaxies) was frozen around six seconds after the birth of the man himself – Einstein himself would have been proud. The exhibit was navigated through a guided tour by a small elderly lady with a terrifying command of the theory of relativity and quantum physics. The crowd was a mixture of Joe Anybodies from the street and some men and women who were clearly academics or scientists, and in the midst of this company it was easy to get intimidated. However when she began asking questions of the audience and few people responded, I wondered about the real nature of the supposed scientists. I couldn’t resist piping up when she quizzed the crowd: “Who can tell me something about gravity?”, as Dave is my witness, I responded with “Every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force governed by their mass and the distance between them”. I actually managed to parrot out that line, although it’s not strictly accurate (I neglected to mention the whole inverse-square bit). She turned on me a gaze lit with Einsteinian zeal and said “Did all of Newton, huh”. I felt extremely small. Here I was quoting seventeenth-century physics in the midst of an exhibit dedicated to a man who had debunked portions of classic Newtonian theory. After the knowledgeable little lady explained at great length why I was not *quite* right, the tour rapidly and mercifully progressed to an interesting study of Einstein’s attitude towards nuclear weapons – to quote, this can be summed up as “The Allies have to build one before the Germans do”. As it happened, Nazi anti-semitism had ironically robbed them of a huge proportion of Jewish academics and scientists who might, under duress, have allowed them to obtain such a weapon in time to deploy it on the battlefields of Europe, and tip the balance in favour of the Axis. It seems evil does always contain the seeds of its own destruction.

The Einstein exhibit completed, we left the closing museum and took a gentle stroll along Central Park west. By now it was early evening and those familiar pangs of hunger had returned, and after quick showers back at the Pennsylvania, we made our way to a branch of TGI Fridays visible from our hotel; it was here that we had our first encounter with the wondrous 23oz beer glasses – for those who don’t have their metric/imperial calculators handy, this is more than a litre of beer squashed into a single glass. Over burgers, we had a great view of the Manhattan evening, eventually leaving and taking the opportunity to visit the Empire State Building by night, this time with well-charged camera batteries. Many, many snaps were taken, and Dave’s filthy weed habit meant that when I returned to where he was smoking a crafty cigarette he had befriended some dazed-looking types. These lads informed us they were from Orange County, and staying in dodgy hostel accommodation for which they were paying more per night than the ultra-bargain deal at our beloved Pennsylvania. Upon leaving the building we informed the guys where they could find us if they fancied a drink (Niles, naturally) and headed back to our favourite watering hole by around 11pm. Gently sampling the Maker’s Mark once again, we somehow lost a good few hours in this bar chewing the fat and exchanging thoughts on the trip, and it wasn’t until we were on our way out that we encountered the formidable Janice and Den. Both New York natives, these were a hilarious and charismatic double act, the calm and erudite Janice, and the Brooklyn native Den, who spoke more rapidly than anyone we have ever met. Somehow we ended up chatting with these fascinating folk for well over an hour, as they were interested in a British perspective on everything from the war in Iraq to comic and anime culture. It was during this time that Dave demolished the remainder of his whisky whilst standing in the street, which we later realised was an arrestable offence. But I suppose everyone breaks the law at least once a day, Dave just found the novelty of ostentatiously doing it in a foreign country. When Janice and Den and we finally parted company Niles had closed behind us, and it was around three thirty in the morning. Dave was forced to leave the whisky glass by the door, and we made our unsteady way past a now-blasé concierge.

Despite our late finish the previous day, Dave and I were up bright and early again on the Sunday morning. By 10am Dave was out and heading across to Steve’s to partake a pancake and bagel breakfast, while I decided to take the opportunity to hit the shops again. After a breakfast at Lindy’s I walked over to Fifth Avenue, taking the opportunity to stop off at an Internet café and sign into Messenger, as well as check my email – who says I’m an addict!? This done, after boring various friends with accounts of the holiday so far, I found a shop named Colony Collectibles. This shop was filled with every kind of memorabilia, from the Beatles to Star Trek, and yet the most exciting thing I could find to buy was a book of blues piano music. This turned out to be a sterling choice from the practical point of view, and held some real insights into improvisational piano playing. I held off buying a Mamma Mia CD album for my parents, as I was sure (correctly as it turned out) that they would already have everything to do with that musical. This done it was time to hit the Virgin Megastore again, where I spent a good hour wandering the book department, unable to resist reading a few chapters of Michael Moore’s “Stupid White Men” and a themed display with some amazing pictures from an astronomy book. I left the store with the MasterCard smoking marginally less than on Friday, and made my way further up to yet more music stores, including a branch of HMV in which I splashed out on more DVDs and music. After a time I found myself in Bloomingdales, which as it turned out was the department store I had in mind when we had been to Macy’s. It may be a smaller store, but I preferred it, and also took the opportunity to grab a selection of the Brown Bags ™ made famous by Friends ™, which I had promised to the same Sarah who warned me not to stare up at the buildings. In this store I also bought a coat, since the leather jacket I had brought with me was growing impossible to wear in the heat.

I left Bloomingdales happy that I had found the store I had remembered, as I had been very disappointed with Macy’s. I realised at this point that I was very close to Grand Central Station, and I took the opportunity to photograph another of New York’s famous landmarks. The entire day rapidly became a fairly lazy mixture of shopping for bits and pieces and visiting minor attractions like this, and by the time I made it back to the hotel in the late afternoon I was feeling thoroughly contented with the world. Soon after I arrived back a phone call from Dave came through, with him informing me that he would meet me in the hotel bar as he had some “good news”. There was only one small problem with this – our hotel didn’t have a bar, only various function rooms, shops and umpteen reception and sightseeing information desks. So, bemused, I telephoned the Williams, whereupon he admitted to me he was in the wrong hotel. It was at this point that I suspected he might have been sniffing the barmaid’s apron, and sure enough when I eventually found him in Niles he admitted to having drunk several stouts and lunching with the other Dave, while Anna and Marilyn went shopping. Realising I had some catching up to do, we sat and drank one or two quiet ales while Dave informed me that he had met a gentleman the sound engineer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were playing Madison Square Garden on the Tuesday evening. This would have been interesting enough, but Dave seemed to hit it off with the guy to the point that he had promised to try and get us free tickets for the performance. We were a little sceptical as to whether the guy would come through, but left him a message and number with the hotel staff anyway in case he turned out to be as good as his word.

In the meantime we decided to take the opportunity to see the top of the Empire State Building during the daytime, this time with a full set of camera batteries and spares. Once again through some serious security we quickly made our way to the top, and on this occasion managed to acquire another Acoustiguide-style audio tour. This one was narrated by a Noo Yawk native, an ex-cab driver who described at great length the major points of interest visible in all directions. As the sun was setting over the city, it proved to be a great opportunity for photographs, and I took hundreds. My insane scheme for almost infinite photographs deserves a mention here. As I revealed earlier, I had brought with me my laptop, and additionally the USB adaptor for my digital camera. With a 60gig hard disk and CD-RW drive, I had potential storage for countless numbers of images, as even if the hard drive became full I could just keep buying blank CDs to which I could burn pictures. In the event I took around six hundred snaps over the entire holiday, which after paring out all blurred/downright awful shots came to around 300 good images. Digital technology is the way forward, folks, but then you knew that anyway.

The potential for Chili Peppers tickets was still 2 days away, so we decided that we would try and make it to a comedy club that Sunday evening, as this had been another activity on our “list of things to do” from the outset. While Dave watched Enterprise on UPN, I leafed through the Rough Guide and found a recommendation for Carolyns, a comedy venue on Times Square. A quick phone call told us the club was showcasing an American comedian by the name of Darryl Hughley that evening; apparently well-known in America with his own show on Comedy Central. Dave and I had never heard of him, but decided stand-up in New York couldn’t fail to be at least passable, and headed down there via a quickly-hailed cab. Once inside we bought tickets and propped up the bar, meeting yet more friendly New Yorkers, one of whom had a picture of a dog on his jacket, and baseball cap with his name printed on it: Captain Scott Shields. He informed us that a comedian had ridiculed this picture until he pointed out that it had been a rescue dog and was now dead of cancer. He informed us he’d never seen the wind so completely taken out of a comedian’s sails. Once inside, Dave and I ordered yet more steak and ale and took our seats to enjoy the warm-up acts, who were pretty entertaining – even if we did get a little lost with some of the local current affairs observational material. At the time, we had no clue who Jayson Blair was. The main event was very funny, and also lasted for a good hour and a half. Between ripping on his minder and coming up with more witty observational stuff there were many hilariously entertaining jokes – he proclaimed he’d never allow a child of his to learn the flute because “listen to the sound a flute makes. A flute is the soundtrack to an ass-whupping”.

Thus fed, watered and amused, we made it back to the hotel in the early hours, taking some snaps of Times Square and 42nd Street by night. For once, we decided against Niles. Instead we retired to the hotel room and decided to catch a little bit of American TV before sleeping. Whilst we were watching, Dave in his bed and me at the desk offloading yet more photographs onto the laptop, a cartoon came on neither of had ever seen before but which we’ve seen plenty of since; the Aqua Teen Hunger Force. A completely demented show whose closest cousin is South Park, this cartoon defies explanation, but the episode we saw – Mayhem of the Mooninites – turned out to be generally lauded as one of the best so far. Dave began chortling when one of the characters proclaimed “Your roommate is a nerd. On the moon nerds have their pants pulled down and they are spanked with moon rocks”. When the last line of the show turned out to be “Prepare for a moon spanking” Dave was slayed to the point where he couldn’t stop laughing off and on for the remainder of the night.

We declined to visit Lindy’s as we upped and left the hotel for 9am on Saturday morning, choosing instead to walk and see if there was a more reasonable bistro or diner at which we could breakfast. Barely two blocks from the hotel, at the intersection of 6th and 31st Street, we found Charlestons. This small bistro offered a decent selection of bagels, omelettes, toasties, coffee and smoothies to start the day, and weighed in at around seven or eight dollars for a decent spread. We immediately decided to make this location our regular haunt for breakfast, leaving Lindy’s for a treat perhaps on the final day. While we were eating in the comfortable upstairs seating area, Dave’s phone rang. Our plan for this day had been for Dave to go and see Steve’s impressive computer setup and have a proper chat with him, while I would again hit the plastic in various shops. However Steve wanted to postpone, as he had other plans for the day, so we shuffled our own plans around. We decided to visit an attraction that had been on our list since the first day, the Intrepid Sea/Air/Space Museum. This amazing attraction is the Essex-class aircraft carrier USS Intrepid decommissioned in 1974 and now moored permanently in the Hudson River, along with the Forest Sherman class destroyer Edson and the guided missile submarine Growler, the name of which unaccountably amused Dave and I for around five minutes. We finished our food and jumped on the subway up to 46th Street. However the museum is located west of 12th Avenue, and native New Yorkers will know a block across the city is far further than one up or down. Dave and I set off on a good thirty minutes’ walk from the 46th Street station over to our destination through some more blisteringly hot sunshine. Like so many other attractions which would make effective terrorist targets, the Intrepid installation is surrounded by some extensive security. Searches and magnetometers ensuring nobody can enter the exhibit with the intention of doing any damage. Dave was gratified to see the provision of an audio tour system called Acoustiguide; this clever setup worked via a sequence of numbers pasted up on the walls beside each exhibit, and the small telephone-alike hand unit (which you temporarily exchanged for a credit card) would then tell you about what you were looking at. I couldn’t resist breaking the system by dialing numbers at random, and at one stage accidentally getting an escort service.

Our first port of call was refuge from the sun in the submarine. The opportunity to wander around a formerly nuclear-equipped submarine is probably one few people get, at least people who don’t get to visit the Intrepid museum, and it was a fascinating experience. Like the Edson and the Intrepid, the submarine is a ship of the World War Two era, which lends an eerily anachronistic feel to the exhibit. Not for the claustrophobic, the guided tour allows groups to walk all the way through the submarine, and see torpedo rooms, bridge and periscopes, officers and enlisted mens’ quarters, mess hall and engine rooms, and it’s truly amazing to see the cramped quarters the crew occupied for weeks at a time. If you’ve seen the film U-571 you’ll appreciate the opportunity to (briefly) be inside similarly confined spaces as those of the U-boat submarine in that film. After the tour, we emerged back out into the sunlight and made our way across to the main part of the museum, the USS Intrepid herself. We climbed straight to the deck of the carrier, and parked on the deck were a huge variety of planes and helicopters. Along with more modern planes such as the AV-8C Harrier, the F-16 Falcon and the F-14 Tomcat made famous by the film Top Gun were any number of fifties and sixties-era aircraft. Additionally there was an A-12 Blackbird spy plane, a jet whose true function was disguised with a fictional fighter/interceptor role, close enough to reach out and touch. Dave rapidly realised the military hardware anorak side of me emerging, and dragged me away from the planes up to the carrier’s bridge. The carrier itself is staffed by veterans, some of whom actually served on it during its service, and it feels almost sacrilegious to be asking them where the toilets were. They were far more prepared to answer questions about the ship itself, and I learned an interesting little bit of military protocol: apparently, on the bridge, only the helmsman’s orders are ever shouted using the terms left and right, whereas everybody else is ordered using the more nautical port and starboard. The veteran informed me this is in order that no matter how intense the battle gets, if the helmsman hears “left” or “right”, he knows these orders are for him, and the critical matter of the ship’s position and attitude will be addressed.

After leaving the immaculately maintained bridge area, we took the lift down to the bottom floor of the carrier, and found to our faint disgust that it had been colonised by McDonalds. However we were both fairly hungry by this point and made a brief pit stop to refuel. Afterwards, we found ourselves walking up to the main area of the carrier’s interior, the museum proper. This is filled with older World War 2 era aircraft, including those which flew from the USS Intrepid during her service, and some amazing replicas of the Mercury and Gemini capsules from the early days of the US space program. On the very day we were there the US Marine Corps had decided to set up a mock “boot camp” towards the rear of the carrier – yet more school trips and unsuspecting youngsters having a teenage drill sergeant yell instructions in their faces and then being forced to do pull-ups, the slogan “Pain is weakness leaving the body!!” yelled at the less capable attempts. Etched in my memory for eternity will be the sight of a very young child, not more than six or seven years of age, having the order “Show me your war face!” bawled at him. His response was even funnier, or more disturbing depending on your viewpoint; a half-hearted gurgle and a grimace which only drove the drill sergeant further into apoplexy. “THAT’s a war face!” he bellowed, demonstrating his own, perfectly refined attempt. Chillingly, by the time he left, the six-year old was practising his new war face on passers-by. Give me a child until seven, etc.

At the rear of the carrier was something we both immediately jumped at the chance to sample, a fully articulated top-quality flight simulator. Featuring dual cockpits and the ability to move through a full 360 degree in all axes, these looked like being a highly entertaining way to squander ten minutes. Two teenage girls had climbed in as we arrived, and screams were coming from their seemingly jammed-upside-down cockpit. After a brief training session, during which we were shown the basics of 1) changing direction, 2) changing speed and 3) blowing the crap out of stuff, we climbed in amongst roller-coaster type overhead restraints. There then followed a hilarious four-minute Dambusters re-enactment as we missed mountain peaks by millimetres and, worryingly, managed to blow up a hotel. The ability to whirl yourself around upside down in a machine under your own control is far more novel than it may seem, and we climbed off keen to have another go, but vetoed on the grounds that we already felt too old to be doing this.

Going forward we happened upon a movie theatre screening a 20 minute documentary charting the history of the aircraft carrier, and more military hardware alongside a memorial to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. This was quite a jarring sight, with actual papers people posted on walls soon after the tragedy, asking if anybody had seen lost loved ones. Equally shocking were two fragments from the debris, a twisted World Trade Centre sign which I recalled seeing intact when I visited the towers in 1996, and a piece of aircraft fuselage, the remains of a window clearly visible along one edge. Considering how familiar the footage of the event is, it was amazing how tangible reminders of the atrocity still had the potential to shock deeply.

After we had finished inside the carrier, we made our way over to the third and final exhibit, the destroyer Edson. On our way across I laughed long and loud at the sight of one of the “war face” marines striking up a cigarette as he talked on his mobile phone – so much for being at the peak of fitness when serving your country. The smaller Edson, meanwhile was just as open to the public as the Intrepid, and we were able to wander all the way across the decks and inside, ducking under 20mm cannons and aiming anti-aircraft guns at passing boats on the Hudson River. This done, we visited the museum shop in order that Dave could buy an enormous metal F-14 Tomcat model for his uncle, who is as much of an military anorak as me. I contented myself with a smaller version of the same plane, in order that I could re-enact Top Gun with the air of some piano wire and MiG models when I got home.

Upon leaving the museum at mid-afternoon we asked yet another friendly and helpful New Yorker how best to get across the island to 4th Avenue, as I had been asked to take some photos of certain buildings by a friend on an architecture course. These were the Seagram building, formerly the Pan Am building, and the Guggenheim museum which drew controversy upon its construction, looking as it does like an inverted beehive. On our way across the city on the seemingly punctual and convenient M50 bus we passed the Radio City Music Hall, and disembarked at the intersection with Fifth Avenue to have a look inside St Patrick’s Cathedral, an enormous and ornate building. Inside there was a wedding going on, the bride, groom and guests seemingly unfazed by the crowds of tourists at the back, and the vows clearly audible through a microphone close to the rector and newlyweds. This was especially poignant for Dave, who was missing out on his auntie’s wedding which was about to start some 3500 miles away. It was once again quite strange to find an oasis of peace and calm in amongst the bustling city outside. Once we’d finished goggling at the wholly un-British spectacle of a public wedding, we left and walked towards where my Rough Guide assured me the Seagram Building was located. This found, I took many snaps, and we then struck out north to locate the Guggenheim Museum. It was another long walk for us up to 89th Street, and eventually we capitulated to complaining legs and feet and jumped on the subway. We located this unusual building and I was disappointed to see it was in quite a state of disrepair, but remained an unusual enough spectacle for me to take yet more pictures.

While I was snapping away, Dave received a phone call from Steve who extended an invitation to join him an some friends for dinner at La Gioconda’s an Italian restraunt on Long Island. We both enjoy Italian food, and so it was that we jumped in a taxi to take us the fifty or so blocks back to our hotel, and prepare to meet Marilyn and Steve at the Long Island Rail Road terminal. We had around an hour to kill during which I found it easy to get myself amused by the name Great Neck (what about the rest of her?), and we met up with Steve and his wife around 7pm. We were told there was a possibility that a new type of double-decker train would take us to Long Island, but in the event it was a boring old single-decker, although like every other public transport we’d taken it was punctual. Within the hour we’d met another Dave and his wife Anna, friends of Steve and Marilyn, and disembarked one station early (Great Neck and Little Neck sound quite similar when announced by someone with acute sinusitis ). As it turned out this wasn’t the last transporting mishap we experienced that evening, but I digress. Hopping extortionately priced cabs across to Great Neck we quickly found the restaurant, and consumed large quantities of beer, wine and filet mignon, and by the time we left the restaurant was a good few dollars richer. We calculated we would have to wait at least an hour before the 11:40pm train would arrive, and I think Dave and I did it by mostly muttering Withnail and I quotes at one another as we all sat on the platform. Much to our mutual dismay non of the other members of the party had seen this cult comedy classic.

Once the train arrived and we were on our way, I noticed a good number of people, mostly attractive, under-dressed girls, who were clearly on their way to clubs. I resisted the temptation to look like a stalker by asking them where the party was, and instead Dave and I decided to go for a drink in Queens with the other Dave and Anna before returning to Manhattan to find a club. We left the train at Flushing after arranging to have breakfast at Steve’s place the following morning, and made our way to yet another Irish bar through the Chinatown portion of Queens. Here the rapid provision of free Guinness held us like a vice, after it became apparent Dave and Anna were regulars and the barman wasn’t shy about doling out the free stout. At this point we realised a club was growing more and more unlikely, but we remained in the bar until around 2am, before leaving to try and get out of Queens and back to Manhattan. Unfortunately this proved to be even more troublesome as we first had to catch a connecting bus – which we almost missed while Dave disappeared off to answer the call of nature – and even once at Flushing station we had absolutely no idea where to go. We were both much the worse for wear, it was almost three in the morning, and we had little idea how to get back to Manhattan. We jumped on what turned out to be the right train, but accidentally disembarked at 40th street in Queens rather than 40th street in Manhattan. I make no excuses. The lesson to be learned here is: never try and navigate the public transport system in one of the outer boroughs of a city like New York, in the early hours of a Sunday morning, while the worse for wear. it’s asking for trouble. Needless to say, when we made it back to the hotel at stupid o’clock, the idea of a club was abandoned. We like to stay out late, but trying to get into the club as the sky is lightening just seems like showing off. While I headed up to bed, Dave wondered up a block to a diner for a much needed coffee and cigarette.