Slavic’s real name is Borislav, but as far as I know, nobody calls him that. I met him four or five years ago when he was either 57-years-old or 67-years-old. At the time, we were both living in Crown Heights, patronizing a medium-bad bar on Nostrand. The beer was
I once had a dream where I was a billionaire. Many, but not all billionaires own something very public. They’re known, of course, for being billionaires, but also for owning that specific thing. A lot of the time, that marquee asset is a sports team, but it can be
One night I was drinking at a bar with a friend of mine and the topic of CPR came up. He mentioned that he wouldn't feel comfortable doing it, to which I responded opposite. Not that I would ever want to perform CPR on someone, but I would
There was a time I frequently fielded calls from the CEO of a company I worked for in the middle of the night. He was, and by contemporaneous accounts, remains one of those self-described luminaries[1] who, rather than work through issues for any amount of time, instead operate in
Only once have I purchased something at the Nintendo store, a mug in the shape of Boo, a ghost who plays the part of an intractable foe to the Super Mario Brothers. I had long considered Boo an aspirational figure as he could not be defeated by typical means, forcing
Imagine a slightly different version of the film Titanic, where the centenarian Rose dies after a long, rich existence. During the lifetime that followed the eponymous ship's fatal voyage, Rose has seen it all. So when she gets to that well-appointed ballroom in the afterlife, and Jack is
Whenever I start to run out of contact lenses, I flirt with the idea of wearing my glasses. This rarely lasts for more than a few days as I invariably come to the same conclusions. Glasses Mike, despite his air of erudition, is simply less comfortable than his counterpart. The
Back when Reddit was still a frontier, rather than a mostly-empty liquor cabinet, a new kind of thing started happening. Celebrities, or perhaps more conservatively, people of some note– the Wikipediaed class– were posting under their own names. Even if you didn’t really care about Verne Troyer, you may
And then the serpent came upon me. It was beautiful, and it said unto me: “leave your fiance. Be with me.” And I said “No.” And thus said the serpent: “your answer matters not. It shall be otherwise.” This is basically the plot of 13 Going on 30 from the
Many years ago, I was at a hotel in the 6th Arrondissement with my mother and we were looking for a place to get escargot. She asked the concierge where to go for it, and suddenly he turned pale. “It is illegal.” We were of course baffled because the idea
Slices abound at the pizza shop. There's pepperoni, chicken and broccoli, meatball and even anchovy. What there is not is mushroom. A mushroom slice— the very reason you came to Italian Village in the first place. Nobody ever had to tell you that the guy behind the counter
Every once in a while I’m installing a bidet at a friend’s apartment when suddenly it’s getting late and I need to start thinking about getting to wherever I must for my evening plans. But what am I going to do about my backpack? “Oh why don’