Rich Mintz  

You know that list of tedious, time-consuming tasks that you keep queued up forever and never seem to make any progress on? I’m talking about things like “call the insurance company to get that claim straightened out” and “figure out what kind of connector this old game machine uses so that you can order a replacement adapter” and “find out which airline has the best bicycle baggage policy.” Some of them are actually urgent, some are just nice-to-dos, but all of them are things that are hard to find time for.

I got an offer via Fab (on which more later) for a discounted first month of service with Fancy Hands, an on-call personal-assistant service. You pay a monthly fee (starting around $25), and for that you can make a specified number of “requests” in email during the course of the month. At the level I’m signed up at, I’ll be paying about $3 per request after my discount expires, and I’m likely to upgrade to a higher tier which makes them cheaper.

Fancy Hands’ helpers are on duty 24 hours a day, and I’ve found them professional, reliable, and competent. They can’t go anywhere for you and can’t spend any money on your behalf, but they can do pretty much anything else for you that a person can do with a phone and/or a computer. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve used them to do things like this:

• make a doctor’s appointment
• straighten out an insurance claim
• track down a missing hotel invoice
• change a train reservation while I’m traveling
• find a suitable hotel in a city I don’t know
• figure out how to connect my scanner to Evernote
• find out what kind of charger I need to power an old device

These are all things I can do myself, but they’re all pains in the ass, and it turns out I’m perfectly willing to pay 3 bucks each to have someone else take care of them reliably, report on the results, and clearly document what they did. So I’m renewing.

This is the time of year when I take my car out of storage, inevitably to find (as I did today) that the battery is dead, but because it’s a Volkswagen, just give it a little boost and it’s off to the races.

By “storage” I mean “untouched for months in a parking lot 10 minutes’ bike ride away,” but it might as well be locked in a vault: they keep it up on one of those car elevators, so getting it out is a production.

Today when I picked it up to drive it around (to charge up the battery and get it washed I took it to get it washed), I had a fee notice on the steering wheel — they’re increasing my monthly parking fee to $250. By NYC standards, this is not a bad deal, and I like the staff at this lot and find it secure; but insurance and parking and registration on this car I own free and clear now amounts to around $450 a month, regardless of whether I use it at all. Maintenance, even in a good year, ends up being around another $100 a month, so I’m paying a hefty price tag for a car I almost never use.

I think last year I probably took the car out a dozen times, mostly in the summer months, of which maybe four were long-distance trips and the rest were day use. That means that if you generously peg the rental value of day-use days at $120 (the cost of 6 hours of Zipcar) and call the long-distance trips $300 each, that means I spent almost $7,000 last year for $2,000 worth of car use. I’m not sure this makes sense anymore.

If I’m going to sell it, this is the time; it’s a good summer car and the weather is nice. So should I?

Because people who work with me and for me regularly do it, and I’m not a precious flower, I decided on the spur of the moment today to take the BoltBus to DC rather than Amtrak. I figured why not save a bit more than a hundred dollars, since it takes only about an hour longer when traveling in the middle of the day when traffic is relatively light.

So here I am on the New Jersey Turnpike speeding along in the left lane at a bit more than 70 miles per hour.

A few observations:

We left 15 minutes late but were through the Lincoln Tunnel in five minutes, are making excellent time and I suspect will arrive ahead of schedule. The bus is direct – board near Penn Station and ride to Union Station, with no intervening stops.

The boarding experience on a sidewalk near Penn Station is not elegant, but (given the context, which is a man in an orange vest yelling at a motley crowd while traffic streams by) is orderly and tolerable.

I booked my ticket 90 minutes before departure and paid $16, which, seriously, is a ridiculously small amount of money.

The bus itself is fine. Seats are newish and comfortable, there’s wifi (not as fast as my AT&T 4G, so I’m not using it). They’re a couple inches too close together, but it won’t kill me. The driver is professional and obviously competent. Air conditioning is operating,

They filled every last seat with standby passengers. I’m near the back, so the air is a little urinous (rookie mistake), but I’ll live.

The crowd is way less low-rent than your typical bus customer was 30 years ago — the vast majority being what I would consider “normal people,” albeit not necessarily wealthy or trendy. I will say that I am one of only two or three people on board who is dressed in business attire (by chance I’m sitting beside one of the others), but nowadays that’s often true on airliners, too.

Bus etiquette is different from train etiquette — people are in conversation, some people are watching a movie together audibly across the aisle — but put on your headphones and it’s fine.

Would I do this again? Sure, anytime my exact arrival time is somewhat flexible.

I’m about a hundred pages into Nadine Gordimer’s new post-apartheid novel, and it’s not any easier slogging now than it was the other day. I’ve read plenty of thinky fiction about Africa (including what felt at the time like 10,000 pages of Norman Rush) and it’s definitely the book, not the subject. (It doesn’t help that the digitization was sloppy.)

Anyone would think this book was heavy. I think even its characters, in whose minds most of the slow, significant, non-action happens, would set it down after 50 pages and go do something else. But I’m going to try to stick with it.

I did, however, take a break to read Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur, an incisive and approachable book of cultural criticism. Rewarding as expected. Klosterman’s one of the smartest people writing on popular culture at the moment, and one of those who seems to have the least to “prove.” It takes significant art to convince me to read an essay about basketball and an essay about Weezer in the same 12-hour period, so there you go.

I’m reading Nadine Gordimer’s new “post-apartheid” novel, No Time Like the Present, and I’m finding it rough going. Stilted phrasing and roundabout locutions, preachiness and messaginess — this isn’t my first Gordimer, but so far (about 30 pages in) the book hasn’t been gentle. Hope it loosens up, because if not I’m not sticking with it for another 400 pages.

Thanks largely to decades of incentive zoning, Manhattan is full of privately owned, municipally owned, and institutionally owned plazas, arcades, and other types of quasi-public space. Some of these spaces are gorgeous (I’m looking at you, Elevated Acre); but many are windswept plazas with a few sad chairs, or cavernous semi-climate-controlled lobbies patrolled by wary security guards.

New Yorkers are desperate for public space, though, and even when we don’t love these places we use them intensely. One of the most frustrating things about Occupy for the other (OK, I’ll say it) 99% of us who live and work in lower Manhattan is that it effectively privatized Zuccotti Park, a surprisingly well-trafficked park, recently renovated and refreshed, occupying a tight square block in this dense neighborhood.

One of my favorite public spaces in the entire city has been open for three years, but I only discovered it recently, and since I did I’ve been back over and over. It’s the grand glass lobby of the 2009-renovated Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. As The New Yorker’s Paul Goldberger wrote in 2009:

In terms of its configuration and the precision of its details, this is probably the most urbane lobby at Lincoln Center. It avoids the grandiosity of Philip Johnson’s space at the State Theatre and the sappy romanticism of Wallace K. Harrison’s Metropolitan Opera lobby. One wall of the new lobby is covered in muirapiranga, a Brazilian wood, set in narrow tongue-and-groove panels. There is a huge freestanding café bar made of Portuguese limestone, with one end sculpted in the form of a flying wedge. It looks like a model of a building by Zaha Hadid, but more elegant.

Because of the soaring glass curtain walls, this lobby is in effect a grand indoor plaza, feeling fully open to Broadway and to 65th Street on two sides. When you’re there on a sunny afternoon, as I was recently, the sunlight streams in. Half the room is furnished with cafe and bar tables, open to use by anyone (the lobby seems to be open to the public at all hours of the day and evening), and in the afternoon and evening, an excellent cafe/bar counter (from the school of “art institution catering,” i.e., artisanal beet salad, not hot dogs) serves reliable, interesting small plates and stocks a full range of beverages. The other half is the open entrance lobby for Alice Tully Hall, which serves as overflow cafe and sitting space during the day.

Because of my schedule I’m typically there in the late afternoon or early evening, when the daytime crowd is starting to give way to a well-dressed and usually older (depending on the evening’s program) night crowd. You get the full people-watching experience, both inside and out, something to eat, and a cheery public space with a pleasant bustle to read your email or whatever.

Just a brief shout-out on behalf of the Star Force series by B.V. Larson — I’m on book 2 and can’t stop reading. It’s proof that just because something has bypassed the big publishing houses (this is from the Kindle imprint) doesn’t make it junk.

Brief plot summary: alien ships land on earth; humans are commandeered into an alien fighting force; stuff happens; it becomes clear that two alien races are fighting each other on our turf. More stuff happens; crisis averted for humanity (barely) on the final pages of Book One; but a surprise at the start of Book Two starts everything rolling again.

It’s obvious that this was written by a certain type of man — the only female character of any significance in Book One is a “coed” — but then so was Heinlein, and we still read him, so there you go. There’s also a bit more deus ex machina than I prefer (replicators, etc.), and Larson’s a bit loose with the science. But if you get into the spirit, the story rolls along.

Swarm: Star Force Series #1

The Google Glasses project that everyone’s talking about is, well, I guess my main point is, sure, it’s going to be awesome, but why is everyone so amazed? There’s really no debate about the fact that this is coming.

It’s obvious that, within my lifetime, not only are we going to have the Internet always with us in cybernetic devices (that cow is more or less out of the barn), we’re going to have it implanted into our bodies in an always-on manner.

I predict (and you can hold me to this): Google Glasses with consumer pricing, i.e., “Internet on our heads,” in 10 years; hearing-aid-type network device accepting subvocalized commands, i.e., “Internet next to our heads,” in 15 years; true implant accepting thought-impulse commands, i.e., “Internet inside our heads,” in 25 years. I plan on staying alive long enough to get the last one.

This stuff has been all over science fiction (of both the utopian and dystopian varieties) for a couple of decades. In fact, at the moment I’m reading M.T. Anderson’s Feed, in which implanted always-on connectedness is a major plot point.

In Feed, told from the perspective of a teenager about 20 years in the future (I’m guessing this because one of the dads in the book says “dude” a lot), kids go to the Moon for spring break, and everyone has a flying car, and (for the 73% of Americans who have always-on feed implants) basically every interaction with the world is shopping-focused and mediated by a corporate information aggregator. It’s awesome that you can chat your friends in your head; some of the rest of it (like the fact that the President of the United States can’t put together four coherent sentences), not so much.

Please take a moment to contemplate Momentum, a new cycling magazine that’s meant for people who use bikes the way you likely do — as stylish and functional accessories to their daily lives, probably in a city.

It was a free-distribution mag for a while and they recently upgraded it to more pages and started charging. It’s really cheap ($20 a year) and I heartily encourage you to subscribe. The copy and ads are more useful than those in Bicycling magazine (which I also read, don’t you worry), and it’s a lot more fun.

That’s what this dude on a fixie said who plowed his bike at about 10 miles an hour into a fat guy in a suit getting into a taxi on 6th Avenue yesterday afternoon. (I was standing about 10 feet away, on the sidewalk, holding my bike handlebars, with a helmet on.) He basically bounced off (fat guy, remember), and nobody was hurt, but everyone involved was embarrassed and pissed off at everyone else.

Not to be uncharitable, but “I don’t have any brakes” isn’t much of an excuse, and neither is “I was going too fast.” The poor cabbie had done his job and stopped in traffic with the bike lane clear; the suit just took a little long to get into the cab, and bike guy wasn’t looking far enough up the road. (LESSON ONE. Enough said.)

Ten points for honesty, there, but hey, watch out! And if you can’t stop in 50 feet at the speed you’re going with the equipment you have, you either need to get some goddam brakes or, I dunno, maybe not ride so fast in the curb lane on congested 6th Avenue? And before you lay into me (I don’t know what “you” I think I’m talking to, this doesn’t apply to anyone I know personally to be reading this blog, but anyway), yeah, I know the fixie “riding experience” is more authentic, and brakes “are no guarantee of stopping” and so forth, sure. I’ll even buy a fixie eventually (I predict it’ll be my eighth bike). But the whole point of riding in the city is not to plow into things, so, you know, TAKE NOTE.