the mofo with the info.

My Moleskine Notebook is one of my few Savage Indulgences*. Despite the fact that I have readily available at my desk my iPhone, my BlackBerry, notepad.exe, evernote.com, PowerPoint, and countless other technologically advanced offerings that could easily supplant my Moleskine, I still like to have this clunky oilskin notebook with my horribly unintelligible scrawl to refer to in meetings and to keep track of my progress on various ongoing projects. However, due to a poorly thought out partitioning scheme several months ago, my current Moleskine is going EOL, and I have to replace it. Naturally, savagery begets savagery, so I am being forced to leave the air conditioned confines of my office and I must venture into meatspace to do some shopping. However, that doesn’t mean I have to be completely unarmed for such a task…

Planning
I’m combinng my moleskine shopping with some other tasks. I need to buy some new pens and highlighters as well, and some sticky tabs for the moleskine. I’m also continuing my search for the Holy Grail of wallets (id window, space for bills, slim); a friend tipped me off to the Bosca Small ID Wallet which looks like it might be The One, and I notice that Saks Fifth carries Bosca. I’m planning to do this all in a half hour lunch break from work, so I’m also going to pick up lunch from one of my favorite food carts, Kwik Meal.

I start out with a tool that Esther just noted on Google Reader earlier today: Text 2 Mind Map. Basically I put my shopping list in a simple text format like this:
Shopping List
Kinokuniya
Highlighters
Fine-tipped pens
Office Depot
4x6 Scotch Pads
Sticky Labels
Barnes and Noble
Moleskine Reporter Notebook
Saks Fifth Avenue
Bosca Slim ID Wallet
Kwik Meal
Lamb and Chicken Rice

and I end up with this:

It’s pretty but it’s not quite what I’m looking for. I wonder if there were any google mashups that would do something like this, and lo-and-behold, it turns out this functionality is already built into google maps, in a fashion.

Some quick searches and tags later and I end up with this:

View Larger Map

OK, ready to roll.

Implementation
So it’s a beautiful day out in Manhattan, so it’s starting to look like this whole meatspace shopping might not be so bad after all BUT on my very first stop, I find that the Google Maps search for the Kinokuniya is outdated, and the space is now some kind of horrible tourist trap related to Rockefeller Plaza. While I could blame this on google not updating soon enough, I’m going to be fickle and use this as an example why meatspace shopping is vastly inferior to online shopping.
Internet 1, Meatspace 0.

My second stop (using the Dijkstra’s algorithm shortist path!) is Saks Fifth Avenue. I wait forever for the elevator to go to the 6th Floor, and I look at their selection of Bosca Wallets and I’m horribly disappointed to find that they don’t carry the one I’m looking for. The only id window wallet they have is a bulky brown monster, and isn’t what I’m looking for at all.
Internet 2, Meatspace 0.

I’m on my way to my third stop, Barnes and Noble when I run into a pleasant surprise. While I had been planning to buy my sticky labels at the Office Depot on 43rd Street, I ran into a Staples 2 blocks farther north, which cuts my trip down a little bit. This is an unintended benefit of meatspace, so I am grudgingly giving them a point (However, they almost lost the point for playing a horrible muzak cover of Heart’s Alone). I buy my sticky labels and some Pentel Flair Pens (not the cool japanese pens I was hoping to buy at Kinokuniya, but oh well).
Internet 2, Meatspace 1.

Barnes and Noble is next. While they sell Moleskines at MSRP which is such a ripoff, I still just buy it. Pretty quick.
Internet 2, Meatspace 2.

Any good venture into Meatspace should end with actual meat, and today is no exception. I stop at the aforementioned Kwik Meal, and the line is surprisingly short. It’s lamb and chicken marinated with papaya, coriander, and whatever unearthly spicy goodness that makes this the best cart in midtown during the day.
Internet 2, Meatspace 3.

All in all, it looks like Meatspace is about to win, when suddenly I round the corner on 5th avenue and am treated to Hello Kitty in a coconut bra:

AAAAUGH, MY EYES! It’s a children’s cartoon character dressed up as Maui Hooker! WHY? Meatspace forfeits all points and does not pass go!
Internet 2, Meatspace negative a billion.

My collection of Savage Indulgences includes but is not limited to: comic books, the non-digital SLR that I never use, the fact that I sometimes order from restaurants that aren’t on SeamlessWeb, my love of index cards.

I give Eater a lot of slack, because they’re part of the Gawker network which makes a living saying ridiculous things, and because they’re mostly spot-on. However, their recent re-review of Per Se had me scratching my head. Did we eat at the same restaurant? I’m not going to go into their claims of “memorability” or “quality”, because those are subjective things. Personally, I’ve been their twice and found the food to be phenomenal, and I certainly won’t forget either of my dining experiences there any time soon. However, when reading that this man’s colleague, a 90 pound size-zero was still hungry after eating there… I was flabergastified and confustibobulated. It is with a heavy heart that I call shenanigans; and disingenuous shenanigans, the worst kind. Unless that restaurant has changed completely in the past 8 months, there is no way that anyone leaves that place hungry.

My first meal there was a seven course meal, with several courses not even counting toward the total, such as extraneous bread and dessert courses at the end (I believe there were three dessert courses actually, but I may have lost count). This meal took about four hours to complete, and we had so much food that we had to take our last two dessert courses home in boxes, along with a free complement of cookies, chocolates, and Thomas Keller’s signature Macaroons. My second time there, Keller was actually in the restaurant at the time, and our waiter gave us the option of having the “Extended Menu”, which all parties involved that night now refer to colloquially as “The Meal of Death”. This is because there was so much food on the table, in our stomachs, and probably scattered on the floor by our chairs that we actually wanted to die. The waiters seemed to take a cruel delight in serving us our gastronomic demise; toward the end we were no longer eating out of hunger or even enticement, but rather that we were too embarassed to consider sending an unbelievable foie gras terrine or a lobster tail over orzo back to the kitchen unfinished. Toward the end of the night we wondered if Keller himself was preparing us, in a Twilight-Zonesque twist, for our own slaughter, after which he could feed our own fat livers to the next customer; I expected him to come out of the kitchen and force food down our beaks with exquisitely crafted, pearl-handled chopsticks.

I cannot conceive of any person, be they female, 90 pound, hypoglycemic, tape-worm infested, or of any other constitution, that could leave that place hungry. Unless of course, they were picky and didn’t eat the food in front of them… in which case I contend that the moniker of “Eater” is extremely disingenuous, no?

Thomas Pink was clearly a classy brand up until about six months ago, so what the hell are they doing? First I hear about this stupid iPod nano tie, which everyone is quick to point out will be unavoidably uncomfortable, and well, retarded. Fine, plenty of high-fashion brands have tried to profit off of the iPod or PSP brands with overpriced unusable accessories. However, right after that I backed out to their main US page and am greeted by… The Pink Panther?

OK, ok, back up there fella. About three years ago, Thomas Pink was the pinnacle of metro fashion; a businessman’s way of declaring individuality from behind a boring double-breasted suit. Even pre-Queer-Eye, this posh british import convinced us that you can wear pink and purple stripes while still grooving on the vertical smile. New York magazine still refers to the store as “a wardrobe mainstay for cosmopolitan businessmen.” Any New Yorker who visited a Pink store during their seasonal sale days would be confronted with a veritable shopping bloodbath, with grown men tearing through stacks of clothing like twenty-something girls at a Louis Vuitton sample sale.

Maybe they’ve just spread too fast. While it used to be a arduous task to find the oddly located Pink stores, they now have locations in prime spots, such as the Time Warner Center (which, let’s face it, kills everything it touches). In either case, why would they tie their upscale menswear brand to a mediocre kids movie remake? OK, I get it… you both have the word “Pink” in your title. But are they really trying to spread the message “when you think of our brand, think of cheap foreign accent and fart jokes”?

The first annual Vendy Awards were held last night. While I appreciate the awarding community’s attempt to honor the street vendors that sustain me so well, I was a little shocked that they overlooked the best street vendor ever. Kwik Meal is so awesome I have trouble forming sentences about it in my mind without drooling all over my keyboard. I have a lot of friends who evangelize for the Halal Cart man (I even know someone who dressed up as him for halloween), but I gotta tell you all, Kwik Meal is where it’s at.

I was the esteemed Ronald Weasley for Halloween this year.

My friends all thought that was a bit drastic that I went ahead and made the carpet match the drapes, but I got the last laugh after all.

Cupcakes have become an integral part of Manhattan cuisine, growing quickly from “Sex and the City” fad pastry to a staple for a growing number of bakeries, following the success arcs of other such specific dishes as Lobster Rolls and the ubiquitous Corn. New York Metro has a great story on the original Magnolia bakery and the resulting schism between founders Jennifer Appel and Allysa Torey , although their version is a little secular for my tastes.

Any real New Yorker knows the true story of La Cupcake Disputà, as immortalized by Raphael Santi in his famous Stanza Della Segnatura frescoes now displayed in the Vatican, and as documented by Milton in his “Aesthetics on Frosting”. Torey, of course, was a strict believer of cupcake-transubstantiation, and that the eucharistic cake and frosting actually became infused with the Real Presence of Jesus’ body and blood at the point of sale; Appel believed that Christ’s body and blood do not come down to inhabit the elements, but that “the Spirit truly unites things separated in space”. The resulting fraction led to the great Cupcake Reformation, by which Appel spun off the Buttercup bakery in midtown and the rest, as they say, is history.
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I must apologize, gentile reader, for the grainy nature of the photo. I will replace it at my earliest leisure, but the matter at hand was far too urgent to wait for a decent camera. I discovered today a social issue that is more disturbing than you can imagine.

Whilst purchasing a lunch, I noted the inscription on my sandwich box, and the salad box of my friend. The box brazenly declares “What we don’t sell we give away to charity.” I was immediately made to pause by the sheer weight of the action suggested to me. Now, I’ve been guilty of my share of a turned-cheek to the indigent in the past; many a time have I played the pauper to a beggar, when in fact I had an abundance of coin in my pocket. However, to purchase this sandwich, and essentially remove it from the hands of the needy was a monstrous act that I was not sure that even I could undertake. Was I ready for my role as the reverse Robin Hood of Manhattan?
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