Spare yourself my blathering today and please read this deeply moving and poignant post over at *E* Deconstructed.

Please be more mindful of how you arrange your Latest News links.

This is downright uncaring. It’s like when the New York Times runs a story about a family being blown to bits in Baghdad right next to an ad for some bauble at Tiffany’s. It happens ALL the time. It’s crass.

Today is the 5-year anniversary of Google’s IPO. When Google went public, I instructed my financial advisor to steer clear because, as we all knew at the time, internet stocks are fun to read about but nothing that a serious investor would include in his portfolio.

The strike price was $85/share. It soared past $600/share in 2007 but has since settled in at a still quite profitable $445/share.

It’s a FACT: When it comes to high finance, I don’t know my ass from my elbow.

I am a menace to the suburbs.

I changed our bank from Citibank to Chase because Citi reduced the reward points on our credit card and I think they’re a sinking ship and it made me nervous to keep our cash there. I had a full box of blank checks that I needed to dispose of. It would have taken too long to shred them, so I did what I did with an old diary of mine; I put it in a bucket and filled it with water. The next day the diary was pulp.

I put the checks in the bucket, filled it with water and promptly forgot about it. That was three weeks ago.

This evening I was grilling chicken and zucchini kabobs and wondered what the bucket was doing in the corner of the yard. I walked over and it was filled with water, paper pulp and mosquito larva. Millions of them. So many that there was barely any wiggle room. It was malaria soup.

Did you know that standing water = mosquito breeding ground? And people say the city is wild, gross and dangerous.

For those of you who are in the city—especially if you work in midtown—I recommend you drop by the Lobby Gallery of the Durst Organization at 1155 6th Avenue (@ 45th St.) for Artisté Florenza’s show, On & Off the Grid. It’s a chance to see a nice representation of her work (25 paintings!) in a spacious, well-lit venue. It’s the largest showing of her work that I’ve seen and it’s nice to see so many of her pieces gathered in one space.

The Artisté has been kind enough to act a docent for 7-Year Old Daughter and I at MoMA and when I mentioned the show to Daughter she insisted on going, so I took her to the opening. It was her first! I didn’t allow her to sample the wine—just a few grapes and some cheese. She was VERY excited and felt a special thrill because she knows the artist personally.

Artisté Florenza loves architecture. Many of the buildings she has honored, especially some in Long Island City where her studio is located, have since been demolished. Developers all over Manhattan are begging her not to paint their buildings.

That’s a little joke.

Here, Daughter is studying a painting of the Metropolitan Life Building in Madison Square Park. A long time ago, I briefly worked for a design firm run by a crazy husband/wife team whose offices were in the crown of this building (the part bathed in yellow light).

Artisté Florenza has painted a series of buildings that are reflected in the glass of an adjacent building. The paintings are effective and a bit eerie.

The show runs through September 18th.

Next month is our 10th wedding anniversary and I have begun the arduous task of shopping for a gift for Mrs. Wife. I say arduous because Mrs. Wife is very, very difficult to shop for. You see, Mrs. Wife doesn’t give a shit about material things. It’s pretty amazing, really. She believes that true, deep happiness doesn’t come with a designer label attached to it. An expensive car, an 8,000 square foot house and shoes as far as the eye can see are relatively meaningless to her. She is one of the most psychologically healthy people I have ever met.

While that makes married life a lot easier, it makes gift-giving nearly impossible. What do you get for the person who doesn’t really need much? She’s fine with a family hug and those are free.

I turned to my old friend the internet. I knew there were traditional gifts for each specific anniversary but I, being just a guy, had no idea what they were.

According the a number of different sites, there are now “traditional” gifts and “modern” gifts. Were you aware of that? The “traditional” 10-year anniversary gift is aluminum/tin. The “modern” gift is diamond.

Oh, really?

That’s a major upgrade. The “traditional” gift of a diamond doesn’t arrive until your 60th anniversary. Here’s what I think happened: A bunch of old hens were sitting around kvetching and decided that they deserved something more than just a piece of tin for putting up with his shit for 10 years, so they rewrote the rules and bumped diamond up 50 years. Does that sound plausible? Can you imagine a man or a group of men coming up with this?

[BTW, our anniversary is 9/11. Thanks, terrorists, for severely fucking up my city and putting a crimp in our anniversary. It’s like having your anniversary on Pearl Harbor Day or Kristallnacht.]