Bourbon Cowboy

The adventures of an urbane bar-hopping transplant to New York.

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Location: New York, New York, United States

I'm a storyteller in the New York area who is a regular on NPR's "This American Life" and at shows around the city. Moved to New York in 2006 and am working on selling a memoir of my years as a greeting card writer, and (as a personal, noncommercial obsession) a nonfiction book called "How to Love God Without Being a Jerk." My agent is Adam Chromy at Artists and Artisans. If you came here after hearing about my book on "This American Life" and Googling my name, the "How to Love God" book itself isn't in print yet, and may not even see print in its current form (I'm focusing on humorous memoir), but here's a sample I've posted in case you're curious anyway: Sample How To Love God Introduction, Pt. 1 of 3. Or just look through the archives for September 18, 2007.) The book you should be expecting is the greeting card book, about which more information is pending. Keep checking back!

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Desperate Planters

It's been a relatively busy Fourth of July Weekend (and it continues clean through till Wednesday!) but the most notable thing that's happened is that I finally seem to have figured out how to post pictures on this site without making an enormous timewasting procedure out of it. (Apparently, while you can import files by uploading photos to the web, finding their unique url, then going to Blogger and typing in the filename, there's also--ahem--a button you can click.)

As a result, you may see more pictures of stuff I've found amusing from around the city. And for this first such official post (the mailbox was unofficial), I think I'll try for a double post from the "desperate planter" genre of New York reading.

See, there are a gazillion planters in the naked city---little islands of greenery in the middle of sidewalks, mostly (I suspect) maintained by the city. But, as with subway stations, just because the city maintains them doesn't mean there aren't squatters, and often the locals try to grow their own flowers in these spaces. The problem, however, is that there are also a gazillion dogs in the city (any apartment complex contains a dozen or so, stacked nine stories high), and of course they'll piss on anything that dares to sit upright. So people put notices on their planters of the "Please Curb Your Dog" variety. And some of them are pretty funny.

Here are two. The first was taken at night not far from a northern-end-of-the-West-Village dog spa (which I'll post pics of later). As a result, it probably sees more than its fair share of action, and every time I read this sign I imagine it being spoken in a shaken, whispery voice that is threatening to burst to flinders under the stress of its hundred daily indignities:

The second is more straightforward. As a word guy, I'm always thrilled when I meet a new portmanteau:

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