From a New Yorker article of a year ago:

Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.

I think that sums up both sides of NYC very well – the cleverly psychotic and the wryly cynical. It’s probably the most poetic act of dissidence I’ve heard all month, both in its partaking as well as its recounting.

There could be a rant about the counterproductive methods of Critical Mass, the Bike Clown Posse or cyclist activists in general (who are, to a man, all nutcases above and beyond their pedestrian counterparts).

There could also be an insinuation that such is far too limiting a subject when Mexico’s declared an actual war on drugs (with actual fighting) or how Pakistan’s imploding, but without focus the blog would lose its voice.

There could thus be a rant about alternative school methods – Charters and other public funding of private education – and how they work in the political short term but fail to address the problem of universal public eduation as a whole.

But right now there’ll be a nod to a general malaise over lack of focus at work, as handily illustrated by this comic from Subnormality.

Or this.