Durham, North Carolina August 8

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Trash Bag Conspiracy

 This morning a grey Altima parked in front of my house.  It had New Jersey plates.  The woman driving the car got out, took three full black trash bags out of the back seat and carried them up the walkway adjacent to the twelve unit garden apartment building across the street. A little while later a grey pickup truck pulled into the spot behind behind the Altima and two women got out.  They walked around to the back of the truck which was one of those with the plastic cover covering the whole back part and opened the tailgate, took several black trash bags out of the back of the truck and instead of crossing the street carried them south toward the next corner and disappeared from my vantage point. A little while after a guy came down my street painting a while line to mark off the street parking.   Someone want to tell me what's going on here? 
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Alinea

I begin this post with yet another warning: there is a lot of abstracted, pretentious twaddle in the following. If you’re not up to dealing with it, I suggest you click out now and come back in a day or two when I might have some more humorous observations about drunks or something. Last Saturday I, along with the Mrs. and a friend of ours from Chicago had the full 20 course tour at Alinea . I wanted to write a review of the experience. Then I realized there is no point. More qualified people than I have written extensively about the place. Go on and google it and find out for yourself. Anything I would add would be redundant, superfluous, and frankly boring since I am terrible at writing about food. Instead of a review, this is a reaction to the experience. But first, we need to discuss the nature of art. (I heard that groan. Go click on this if you don’t want to hear about it). I am not an academic. I am not an art critic, food critic or any kind of critic. I am, however, a...
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On vs. In

I was born on Staten Island but I grew up in Bay Terrace. There are restaurants in Manhattan, some of them are in Greenwich Village and some are on the Upper West Side. “In” versus “on” vis a vis location. What’s the rule? I Googled and Binged the subject and didn’t come up with much. I guess most people are like me and they just play it by ear. It still seems very arbitrary to me and just so I make it clear that it’s not exclusively a New York thing, I’ll note that when I visit the Chicago one speaks of being “In Chicago” but if you go to Wrigley Field you’re “on the North Side” as opposed to being in an area downtown where you’re “in the Loop.” Back in New York, you can be both “in Brooklyn” and “on Coney Island”. In France you can be “in Paris” and “on the Champs-Eysee”, though I think the distinction there is that one is almost always “on” a particular street or avenue while “in” a city. Still, none of this addresses one of the great regional linguistic conflicts: Friends and reade...
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