This post is pure daddy blog drivel. It’s the type of thing I pass over if I’m behind in my Google Reader. I provide it for my distant siblings who live hundreds of miles away and don’t get to see their nieces very often. Feel free to read on and comment, but you’ve been warned.

The Daughters are a classic exercise in extremes. 8-Year Old is sensitive. Almost too much so. She’ll apologize for things that have nothing to do with her. She picks up after her sister to avoid seeing her disciplined. She worries. Her heart will be broken 1,000 times.

On the other hand, 4-Year Old is utterly remorseless. She’ll commit the same wrong over and over again. She’ll apologize, but with a big smile on her face that makes you question her sincerity. Sometimes, she lies. She’ll break hearts without regret.

How do I get their temperaments to meet in the middle? Is there a magic pill?

Weekend afternoons with 8-Year Old Daughter have given way to afternoons with 4-Year Old Daughter. She likes to visit the botanical garden near our home. The land was once owned by Vito Genovese, one of New York’s crime family bosses. New Jersey busted his ass, took his property (beautiful gardens and rolling hills) and turned it into public domain.

Here, she confronts the half man/half demon-beast scarecrow. She asked me to pick her up so she could touch his pointy teeth and see what they feel like. This is the type of thing that would have given 8-Year Old nightmares when she was her age.

Near the entrance is a topiary caterpillar. I point it out to her. She walks up…

…and, of course, puts her head in its mouth. I could get all metaphorical about her disregard for danger but that would just cause me to lose sleep at night.

We always bring a bit of bread so she can feed the goldfish in the pond. It’s a constant struggle to keep her from fall in. Imagine me bringing her home covered in pond muck! Boy, would I be in the dog house!

Our afternoons end as they always have. As they always will. At the diner.

I was walking up Varick Street at 7:00 a.m. and came across this sad sight.

Some shitheel took out a tree with his/her sloppy driving. It was a direct hit. It looks like they drove their car right onto the sidewalk and up the trunk of the tree. They stripped the bark clean off for added insult. I can only hope the car was damaged beyond repair.

For some reason, my heart always breaks a little bit when I see a tree taken down. Who doesn’t love trees!? I especially enjoyed J.R.R. Tolkien’s treatment of them. At this point, Manhattan is almost solid concrete. Trees are a scarce commodity. This is one of the distinguishing characteristics that makes London a nicer city than New York. London is much greener and feels more like a collection of homey neighborhoods.

Here’s a rather plain but still attractive building on 8th Avenue and 15th Street across from the the truly gorgeous Apple store. It has some clean lines and I like the crown work. The brick façade is nice and warm. The awning is a nice touch. Unfortunately, it has been murdered by some shitheel architect.

We’re all out of horizontal space in New York so a popular work-around is to utilize the vertical space. There are lots of older buildings that have had structures added to the top of them. It can sometimes work with the existing aesthetics but what happened here is an abomination.

An ugly, festering, cancerous carbuncle has been jammed onto the top of the original building. It doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with the original design. But what the hell. I’m sure they’re making a fortune off the rentals and in New York, too often, that’s what it’s all about.

Fun fact: To the right is the Old Holmstead Steak House. At 140 years, it’s one of the oldest steak houses in Manhattan. I had a Kobe beef burger there once and it was kind of gross. The meat was almost raw.

Today, millions of Americans will visit their local polling stations and vote. This is a critically important mid-term election that will shift the balance of power in Congress.

For the first time in my life, I won’t be voting. About six weeks ago, I absent-mindedly got a ticket to the theater tonight. I left for work at 5:30 a.m. and won’t be home until about 11:00 p.m. The polls weren’t open that early in the morning and they’ll have long closed by the time I get home.

The tragedy is not that I won’t be voting. The tragedy is that I truly, truly, don’t care. It doesn’t bother me in the least. I always hated politically apathetic people who didn’t exercise their right to vote. In other parts of the world, people either can’t vote or are, quite literally, shot at when they try.

But I have been drained dry of any enthusiasm for our political process. On Wednesday morning, a bunch of worthless bums will have been thrown out of office, only to be replaced by a different set of worthless bums. I have no faith that any of the clowns running for office will change Washington in a meaningful, positive way.

I’d rather go out and see a play.

I’m no better than Nero. Shame on me, for allowing them to get under my skin.

* 10 bonus points to anyone who can tell me where this great post title is from without Googling it? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

When I left work yesterday, there was a steady rain. I ducked and weaved between the raindrops and made it to rotten old Port Authority relatively unscathed. We came out of the Lincoln Tunnel on the Jersey side and it had stopped raining. We turned a corner and I saw this:

Boy, if this isn’t a metaphor, then I don’t know what is. It was vibrant and bright. The picture doesn’t do it justice. By the time I got my camera out we had shifted position but when I first laid eyes on this, it came down directly onto Times Square. A direct hit!

This may be bad poetry, but Manhattan has always been the Emerald City to me. And in my world, Times Square is what lies at the end of the rainbow.

I had this friend, Klinger, who was one of the all-time great schemers. He had a million ideas for cutting corners and gaming the system.

My favorite grift was the one he pulled on the post office. He and his Chinese girlfriend, Fun, decided to throw a dinner party. This was long before the internet invaded our lives in any meaningful way, so they sent the invitations via the post office (which now seems quaint and unsophisticated).

He took all the invitations, addressed them to himself and put the invitees return address on the back. Then he deposited them in various Manhattan post offices and letter boxes, but didn’t affix any stamps. Every single invitation was delivered with “RETURN TO SENDER FOR INSUFFICIENT POSTAGE” stamped in red on the front. Genius.

We both kind of liked the same girl in that special way, if you catch my meaning. An actress named Mimi. (I was a sucker for actresses in my youth.) Mimi took up with a successful artist who had a place out in the Hamptons. She would go there for the weekend and Klinger and I would sit in Manhattan and stew in our rejection. We’d spend the weekend insulting his talent and manhood and question Mimi’s taste in men.

Klinger tried his hand at acting, writing, stand-up comedy, directing and promoting, all with limited success. He eventually broke up with Fun and moved to Los Angeles to try his luck there. I wonder what ever happened to that guy?

I’m a big Roy Lichtenstein fan but the Morgan Library does him no favors in the Black and White Drawings 1961-1968 exhibit currently up through January 2nd. Pop art has always been criticized for not being “serious.” In my mind, that’s a load of horseshit. The works that Lichtenstein, Warhol, Damien Hirst, Red Grooms, et. al. have produced are fun to look at. Does it have to be deep all the time? Lighten up, snobs!

One criticism is that pop art lacks originality. Well, they naysayers may have a point. Lichtenstein made a career out of reproducing already existing comic drawings and rechristening them as art. The Morgan takes some of his work and lays it side-by-side with the source material and do you know what? It’s kind of disheartening! He really did just copy comic panels and call it art.

In addition to the Lichtenstein exhibit, the Morgan also has a juicy Degas: Drawings and Sketchbooks exhibit through January 23rd. It’s just 20 drawings and two sketchbooks, so it’s easy to do both the Lichtenstein and Degas exhibits in just one visit.

It’s worth your while to take a few minutes and click though the online exhibit of the drawings. They’re so beautiful. There’s a few haunting self portraits.

The exhibit includes prototype sketches of his little dancer sculpture.