It’s passover week and that means the Mitzva Tanks are winding their way through the streets of Manhattan. They’re fantastic! Mitzva Tanks are mobile homes owned by the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism. They blast music and hang out the window and wave at stunned onlookers. Their mission is to spread good will to non-observant Jews. And you don’t have to be a Jew to get a free pamphlet!

Many Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism believe the last Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson who died in 1994, was actually the messiah.

I report this with all due respect. I believe ALL religions have their own preposterous claims. I don’t find this any odder than being told that not prescribing to a specific set of beliefs will send me straight to hell, as the Christian and Muslim lunatic fringe would have me believe. Besides, how can you feel anything other than good will towards someone who drives a Mitzva Tank?! They seem so happy! I ran into these guys on my lunch break along Central Park South parading in front of the priciest hotels in the city.

Hang around graphic design long enough and you’ll realize that a good design is something that should be beaten to death. Case in point. I noticed that the Sunday New York Times Magazine had a cover graphic that looked an awful lot like the cover of the new Bruce Springsteen CD. I’m sure the chunky-white paint font look is just a weird coincidence.

This sort of thievery has gone on for ages. Corporate logos have repeatedly used a modified Nike swoosh. It’s not exactly like the swoosh, but it’s born from that. There’s the upward swoosh…

As regular subscribers know, I’m a big supporter of public art installations. I believe it’s public funds well spent. Here’s a new one up at 8th Avenue and 46th Street, right in the heart of the theater district. It’s called the Manhattan Oil Project by Josephine Meckseper. It’s two full-scale functioning oil wells in the middle of an empty lot.

The work is supposed to “…draw parallels between the American industrial system…and the disembodied present of electronic mass-media, surface advertising, and consumerism – so clearly embodied in Times Square.” I hate artist-speak. It always comes off as pretentious blabber to me. What do oil wells have to do with surface advertising and consumerism in Times Square? Nothing, as far as I can tell. Maybe I’m being too literal.

Sorry, but this piece doesn’t work for me. Seeing an oil well plunked down in the middle of Manhattan might make you do a brief double-take, but it’s not a spectacle. I liked the tire tube tornado of a few posts back better. That was pretty special, but I seem to be the only one who was impressed by it. Maybe everyone will love this even though I am underwhelmed. I’m often out of step.

My favorite part of the exhibit was stumbling across the unintentional juxtaposition of and ad for Jesus Christ Superstar, which just opened on Broadway to lukewarm reviews, and the neon sign for the Midtown Scientology center.

10-Year Old Daughter is having a bit of a struggle with her grades. Nothing too serious, but I’m concerned. I was a terrible student and wasn’t able to attend college because of my poor grades and lack of ambition and I don’t want the same fate to befall her.

She has a friend who has, what appears to me to be, a hard life at home. His dad left and married a younger woman. Money is tight. The house is in need of repair. His mom is looking for love and at 10-years old, that can’t be an easy thing to bear witness to. Yet his grades are spectacular. He’s in an advanced reading group.

Can someone explain why my daughter is being raised in a safe, nurturing home but struggles with some aspects of her schoolwork, while he’s excelling in such an emotionally challenging environment?

There was a horrific accident on the New Jersey Turnpike. My arrival home was severely delayed because of the traffic jam. They had to land a medivac helicopter on the freeway and airlift someone who was critically injured. As we crawled passed the accident scene, I saw a car that had been flipped upside-down and reduced to a ball of mangled metal.

The very next morning I got a text from a friend. She had to rush to Ohio. A friend’s wife had passed away suddenly. She wasn’t sick and didn’t have a history of medical problems. The trauma of the event caused him to have a heart attack. My friend and her husband were rushing to be by his side.

That’s two reality checks in a 12-hour period. I am guilty of getting too wrapped-up in the minutia. I forget that it can all go in an instant. Some guy is commuting home from work. It’s the same boring drive he’s made hundreds of times. But on a random Thursday, it all changes in an instant. A woman gets out of bed and for no apparent reason, drops dead. As if someone snapped their fingers and the life drained out of her.

I’m not one to fret about being visited by a host of horrors but, brothers and sisters, please seize the day. Life is so fragile. Sometimes I lose sight of the way and I really take these unintentional reminders to heart.

I love when public space is used for outdoor exhibits and New York has an abundance of projects that pop up every spring and summer. They don’t always work, but I’m always appreciative of the effort. In most cases, the exhibits simply cannot fit in a closed space. Many are site-specific and wouldn’t work in an indoor setting. Here are a couple of recent examples. Thank you, Mayor Bloomberg and the New York Public Art Fund. More of the same, please!

This is Mr. Fun himself, Andy Warhol by Rob Pruitt.

I think the inspiration is Warhol’s Mylar balloons. It stands at the north end of Union Square at 17th Street and Broadway.

It’s outside the building where Warhol’s Factory was. [I believe this was The Factory’s second address. This is the location where he was shot by Valerie Solanas.] The building now has a Petco on the ground floor.

The Factory was located on the third floor. When Warhol moved The Factory here, Union Square was a den of gypsies, tramps and thieves. In addition to the Petco, Union Square now has a big Barnes & Noble and a busy McDonalds. I think he’d approve.

This beauty is Tornado, a commission by Berlin-based artist Michael Sailstorfer.

It’s made from inflated truck tire inner tubes. That’s Sailstorfer’s medium. Inner tubes. I spoke to a couple of people and they weren’t overly impressed but I really liked it.

It stands at the southeast corner of Central Park, near The Plaza Hotel and works nicely when you view it in concert with the trees. It really is kind of tornado-like. So clever.

I couldn’t decide which of these shots of The Flatiron Building I liked best so I decided to post both of them. When it opened, The Flatiron Building was described glowingly as “a great battleship steaming up Broadway.”

This is Mrs. Wife’s favorite building in New York. Doesn’t she have great taste?! They’ve taken a portion of Broadway in front of The Flatiron away from the taxis and traffic and turned it into public space. It’s a fantastic place to sit and whittle away a few hours.

I’m about to begin the indoctrination program that will make Daughter the Second comfortable with navigating New York City. You have to get inside their tiny heads as soon as possible for it to stick and she’s almost six, so it’s time. It’s a rite of passage. Daughter the First is already hopelessly attached to Gotham, so my work there is pretty much complete.

You start with something safe and simple and then move on to more complex things. And take it from me, you can’t get safer than a matinee production of Disney’s The Lion King. It’s visually stunning but the music is boring and forgettable. It’s the bait I used on Daughter the First and it worked like a charm.

I marched down to the Minskoff Theater box office on my lunch hour and whipped out my credit card. Things have changed a bit since the last time I was there. The seating plan has been reconfigured. They now deem over half the house as “Premium Seating.” Typically, a premium seat would indicate a seat in the center orchestra and no further than, say, five or six rows from the stage. You can now pay $210 for ONE ticket in the 14th row off to the side. Or, if you’d like to sit in the last row on the floor in the back of the house, you can pay $154 for a seat. There’s money to be made and tourists to be gouged and fathers with good intentions to be taken advantage of. What a bunch of greedy, blood sucking leeches.